Movie Review - I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2009)

Starring Matt Czuchry, Jesse Bradford, Geoff Stults, and Keri Lynn Pratt
Directed by Bob Gosse

Let me start with a few choice quotes (that contain some mild spoilers):

• Soon after lothario Tucker Max (played by Matt Czuchry) sleeps with a deaf girl in the opening scene, his buddy Dan (Geoff Stults) utters the line, "So, you already screwed that mute girl last year, and now a deaf chick...you're two-thirds of the way to a Helen Keller!"
  
• Tucker's caustic angry friend Drew (Jesse Bradford) to Dan, after Dan tries to get him to lie to his fiancé: "I'm not lying for you cretins. My moral compass doesn't point directly down my pants."
• After Dan spends the night in jail after an awful strip club experience, Drew says to Tucker (who spent the night with a "small" stripper), "You couldn't sacrifice a midget vagina to help him."

That's what you're dealing with here...and, if I'm being honest, those lines were pretty damn funny in the context of the movie. The problem with the movie is that the character of Tucker Max (who really isn't a character, I guess, since this is based on real-life douchebag Tucker Max's sexual escapades) is so unappealing as a movie character that I didn't give a damn about the guy. Sure, they try to "sanitize" him in the end by giving him a nice speech at Dan's wedding, but he's still an asshole, and the speech comes off as ridiculous and out-of-place.

The best comparison I can make is that Tucker Max is like a college-age Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell. Everyone knows the guy's a dick, but the ladies love his smarmy demeanor and the guys want to hate him, but can't because they admire that he gets all the chicks. Somehow, despite the fact that Zack often hurt his friends, they always came back to him. Tucker Max is Zack Morris.

Fortunately, the film doesn't really focus on Tucker for a good portion of it. Instead, we concentrate on Dan and Drew, and Jesse Bradford's Drew was quite funny. Having just witnessed his fiancé cheating on him, Drew is done with women and his biting humor was quite enjoyable. He's saddled with a stupid storyline of falling in love with a stripper with a heart [are there any other strippers in movies?] and it's just so basic and rudimentary (as is most of the movie) that it falls flat.

The whole movie disappoints in that manner. The direction and set design is obviously from the school of straight-to-dvd. How this got a wide release, I'm not sure. It's not that it was godawful (I've seen much worse), but it just didn't look appealing in any way. The script is poor. There's a completely unnecessary scene at a bar that goes on for ten minutes that literally goes nowhere and does nothing to advance the plot in the slightest. The scene in the strip club is completely and utterly unappealing (then again, are strip clubs ever appealing in movies? I'm not quite sure I get the allure...I've never been, so maybe I shouldn't be ripping on it 'til I've tried it...which will never happen).

And then there's one of the worst scenes filmed this year. It involves farting, diarrhea, leaking toilets, and stained socks, and it's a scene that I never need to see again. Maybe if I was eight, I'd think jokes about fecal matter were funny...I'm not eight...

Still, not an awful movie when it doesn't focus on the egotistical Tucker Max, but there's really nothing here to recommend. From the get-go, we know that Tucker is a dick, but I almost want to say they didn't go far enough in showing his brutish ways. It's as if the screenwriter (Tucker Max himself) knew that a movie about Tucker couldn't work, so they needed to focus on Tucker's friends and then try and sterilize and sweeten the ladies' man in the end.

Go all out, or don't go at all.

The RyMickey Rating: D