20131115: Comedy Review--Stag

Stag

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Canadian live action feature length film, 2013, NR, 83 minutes, comedy.
2. IMDB: 4.0/10.0 from 168 user ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes:  'No Score Yet...' and 25% from 21 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.0/5.0 from 9,441 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Brett Heard.
6. Starring: Donald Faison as Ken, Eva Amurri as Veronica, Jon Dorre as Luke, Pat Thornton as Carl, Brendon Gail as Rory, Jefferson Brown as Henry McCarthy, Mayko Nguyen as Caroline, Jon Dore as Luke, Leah Renee as Candy/Margaret, Tony Nappo as Paul.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Ken has quite a tradition of pranking his friends savagely at their stag parties.  Now that Ken is getting married to Caroline, he's justly apprehensive about payback time.


2. Ken recounts some of the episodes, and Caroline starts to wonder about him.


3. Ken's friends are loading up on their own angst and anger (much due to Ken) before the party.


4. The setup for the stag party has many threads.  Carl, the enormous screw-up, is to help protect Ken, but Carl has locked himself into an elevator prop.  Luke is asked to pickup the stripper from work, but he's recognized by an old friend, and has to lie his way through it. Henry gets kicked out (that afternoon) of his own place by his girlfriend, who has already picked out someone else.  So Henry is in a really good mood.


5. The stag party gets going slowly.  Luke and Candy talk while they wait.  Carl and the woman trapped with him talk while they wait.  Paul and Henry talk as they wait. There is just one whole lot of talk while they wait.


6. Boredom factor is high.  If I wanted long periods of irrelevant and not funny conversations, I would have sprung for a ticket to a third tier amateur theatre.


7. Ah, the stripper is just a fake, a blogger profiling them for their descent from manhood into drone-hood, or 'manopause'.  Nice.  Fits the rest of the film.  Like everything else here, the film is flaccid and ineffective.  The payback is an evening's boredom.  Even the stripper's ever-so-short performance is turned into cold oatmeal.  The only person who makes any traction is Carl, the most singularly useless character in the film.


8. Will anything come out of this stag party?


3. Conclusions
1. I would not recommend this film to any one for any reason.
2. One line summary: Ineffective people talk about boring things.
3. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10


2. Sound: 7/10


3. Acting: 4/10 Hm, hire actors next time, and a better screenwriter.


4. Screenplay: 4/10 Written by someone who hates viewers.