Reno 911!: Miami

Robert Ben Garant, USA, 2007
1.5 out of 4 stars

This is of course one of those films that defeats criticism, if only in the sense that when you say it’s bad, people who are likely to agree with you say “no duh, why did you watch that anyway?” while people who disagree with you will call you names like “elitist,” or tell you that it’s supposed to be dumb. Admittedly I am not a big fan of stupidity for its own sake, but I have found the show fairly entertaining in small doses – if you’re not familiar with it, it centers around really idiotic and obscene police officers in Reno, sort of a broad Cops parody with a strong basis in improv.

I think it’s pretty clear that there was no real chance of the material being made into a good film, as the people involved just don’t seem to have the discipline for it. One bit that really struck me was an extended sequence in which successive interactions consistently had an awkward dissolve transition as the editor had to skip over the unsuccessful improvisations the actors had probably stumbled through. I could go on about other ways in which this film was poorly thought-out or shoddily made, but the main point is that, for the most part, it was not particularly funny. The best praise I can give is that I didn’t really think that much about how bad or pointless it was until afterwards; I wasn’t really enjoying it, but neither was I angry about how bad it was (and that is saying something, with me)

Source: Charter VOD
10 Jan, 9:13 PM