Review: Mr. Woodcock

See, the movie has the word "cock" in the title. That's what makes it funny.

And I hope you get a whole lot of laughs from that hilarious moniker, because it's funnier than anything found in this witless, worthless waste of ... anything. Time, money, effort, you name it. I've seen documentaries about hair cancer that offer more laughs than this movie. (Well, not really, but I'm trying to make a point. My apologies to anyone who has ever suffered from cancer of the hair.) Not to pat myself on the back, but that parenthetical comment I just made? Also funnier than anything found in Mr. Woodcock. And the comment wasn't really all that funny.

Forgive me for spinning my wheels in the early part of the review, but asking me to review Mr. Woodcock is like asking an experienced food critic to review warm water. There's just nothing here, folks. OK, stop me when this sounds like it'd be worth your nine dollars: A self-help author returns to his cozy hometown only to discover that his mother is sleeping with a despised gym teacher. (Are we at $9.00 yet? No? Only about 64 cents? Fine, but I think you're being generous.)

The sedate and nerdly author is played by the generally manic Seann William Scott; the snarling jerk of a gym teacher is played by a very bored-looking Billy Bob Thornton; the vanilla-flavored mom is played by a slumming Susan Sarandon. (Amy Poehler pops up intermittently as an acid-tongued agent. She comes close to delivering some laughs, but is constantly undone by the flat gags and ham-fisted editing.)

Precisely where the JOKES are ... is anybody's guess. I assume all the scenes in which children are physically abused by a ruthless adult bully are meant to be amusing, but maybe I missed that day in Comedy 101. The screenplay (by a pair of first-timers, and boy does it show) may have once housed a nugget of cleverness, but the 83-minute eyesore that I witnessed seems to believe that nothing in the universe is funnier than a grown man being forced to imagine his mother having sex. The movie's not even clever enough to use its titular gag in the movie. Thornton's character may as well be called Mr. Jones.

As a fan of all three leads, I held a certain amount of positivity as I sat down to watch the flick, but there's just no denying how atrociously-made the thing is: Characters deliver a LOT of their dialog while offscreen, the scenes just sort of collide into each other with no sense of logic or pacing, and director Craig Gillespie (another first-timer*) hits every button he can get his fingers on. Mr. Woodcock goes from painful slapstick to desperate farce to mircowaved melodrama -- and none of it works. Even the lamest comedies out there manage to wring one or two chuckles from yours truly, but this ugly, obnoxious flick couldn't even manage half a smirk. Ms. Sarandon can take solace in the fact that she earned a quick paycheck ... and also that, by 2008, nobody will ever even remember this movie existed.

(* Good news for Mr. Gillespie: His second feature (Lars and the Real Girl) recently played the Toronto Film Festival, and I've heard lots of good things about it.)