Film number 9 – Very Bad Things
This dark comedy form 1998 stars Jon Favreau, Christian Slater, Cameron Diaz, Jeremy Piven and Daniel Stern. Jon Favreau and Cameron Diaz are about to get married, to celebrate Favreau and his buddys go for a weekend bachelor party in Las Vegas and manage to get into a lot of trouble. This synopsis might sound familiar to you because it is basically the same premise as the highest grossing R-Rated comedy of all time The Hangover. When The Hangover came out many reviews said that these films were incredibly similar and having now seen both I can tell you that while the initial foundations are comparable the way both play out is entirely different. This is mainly due to the tone; In the Hangover we never really get to see all the acts of debauchery but in this movie we see everything, all the drugs and alcohol and things that their wives and partners wouldn’t want them doing. The story really begins when Piven’s character accidentally kills a prostitute, rather than go to the police Christian Slater convinces them all to try and cover it up and from here the film plays out.
The great thing I like about this film is that instead of shying away from moments that are depressing and unethical, it goes straight in and doesn’t care. The plot and situation gets more out of hand and the characters get even more sick and twisted. This is the debut film written and directed by Peter Berg who has since gone on to do films like The Kingdom and Hancock, so as you can see he deffinatly left the world of the dark comedy far behind for the giant Hollywood blockbuster. This is a real shame because the writing and story here is quite impressive, unfortunately Berg’s next film is to be an adaptation of the board game Battleship, so I guess he’s not going back to low budget comedy any time soon.
All the actors in the film are on top form, always entertaining and believable the whole way through. There are many moments when the situation is very gritty and real, yet entirely farcical at the same time and it’s quite amazing that it all works. It’s a very hard film to talk about in detail because the story is so fun to follow, so without giving away any spoilers I can say that it rarely follows conventions. The action of the characters is generally very surprising and unexpected. If you thought that The Hangover was really bizarre and out there then you’re never going to believe how this film moves.
It’s a real shame that the film didn’t do better, it didn’t cost very much to make and I think just about made its budget back in grosses. The world cant have been that different twelve years ago but there has got to be some reason. Most likely it’s the difficult and disturbing subject matter, also just looking at that poster you can see that it was horribly marketed.
A lot of fun and very witty, sick and twisted.
7 out of 10
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