Review by:
Andrew Welch

Even more than its writer or director, stars are what often draw moviegoers to see a particular film in the first place, and Movie 43 certainly has a lot of them: among then, serious performers like Kate Winslet, Greg Kinnear, Dennis Quaid, Richard Gere, Naomi Watts and so on. But even the starriest ensemble can only do so much when working with such unbelievably dire material.

Movie 43 is a sloppy collection of sketches roughly stitched together with scenes of a Hollywood has-been played by Quaid pitching an idea to an executive played by Kinnear. The has-been prefaces his pitch with an earnest speech about how he wants to make a movie with both smarts and mainstream appeal. Ironically, the movie they’re both in has neither. Worse, even the various filmmakers involved—Peter Farrelly and Brett Ratner among them—seem to have a certain awareness of just how awful much of this material is. As our audience surrogate, Kinnear’s executive responds the way we surely would: with disbelief and disgust. When he rejects the pitch outright, however, the has-been proceeds to pull out a gun and forces him to listen to the rest of it at gunpoint; one shot even puts us in the executive’s shoes, staring down the end of the barrel. Like Kinnear, we’re going to get this movie whether we want it or not.

Of the many stories Movie 43 crams into its 90-minute runtime, the one you’ll probably hear the most about features Winslet on a blind date with Jackman. He’s suave and handsome, yes—but, it turns out, he also has a pair of testicles on his neck. Clever, huh? In another tale, Watts and Liev Schreiber play parents who take home schooling to a bizarre and disturbing level, putting their son through every embarrassing high-school moment they can think of; the sketch doesn’t reach its apex until both parents have made—get this—sexual advances towards the poor kid. The mind boggles at the thought that someone behind the scenes actually found that hilarious.

The only segments that are close to successful are a faux-public service announcement about vending machines, copiers and ATMS powered by little children; and a sketch about superhero speed dating. Considering the poverty of genuine wit and ingenuity elsewhere, however, the rest of Movie 43 brings two questions to mind: Who in their right mind would want to be in this, and who is this movie even for?

I guess we have our answer to that first question, but we’ll have to leave that second one to the bean counters who pay attention to box office grosses. Come to think of it, “gross” is another way to describe Movie 43 itself. Forget about the all-star cast and point your fingers of blame directly at the creative team that devoted so much time and energy to writing these puerile sketches, not to mention the producers who had enough misguided faith in the project to pay for all those stars in the first place.