Cheap Thrills

Black comedy may be harder to nail than regular comedy. For a black comedy to work, there has to be absurdity to balance out the darkness. You can’t have this dark, foreboding atmosphere and have the humor be subtle and understated. It won’t ever feel like a black comedy that way; it’ll just feel like a movie being played straight, with a ln awkward undercurrent that throws everything off balance. This is one of the many things that derails Cheap Thrills. The premise is simple: a rich asshole is giving his young trophy wife the birthday of a lifetime by getting two guys to compete against one another in a series of increasingly embarrassing, and ultimately dangerous, tasks. How do you liven up a potentially dark situation like that? Get big with the stunts. Make them exaggerated. Make the characters larger than life. Have it be a back and forth between the two contestants so it doesn’t feel like a competition … or maybe even get the two to escalate the dates. Cheap Thrills does none of this. The couple are morally bankrupt and sick, one of the two guys is a greedy asshole, and the other is lost his job and got an eviction notice on the same day, and is scared his family will be out on the street in a week. Ain’t that funny? So, maybe it could be rescued somehow by the married guy fighting through difficult tasks to save his family. Stuff that pushes him into uncomfortable but funny places.  What’s the first task that does accomplishes this? The woman wants to have sex with him. He can get the money to stave off the eviction notice if our sympathetic hero commits adultery. So funny. And really makes us feel for the protagonist! It just gets worse from there. The tension between the two guys builds and they get violent with one another on occasion, usually the greedy asshole attacking the jobless husband. Is this supposed to build sympathy? Kinda lost that when he cheated on his wife. It certainly isn’t funny, watching two desperate men debase, degrade, and humiliate themselves over money. And the tasks don’t get more outlandish; they just get more mean-spirited. Chop off a finger, eat a dead dog, eat the chopped off finger. Not only is it not funny, even the movie doesn’t seem to think so; the tones of the characters is somber, the score is somber, and everything is played straight. So if it’s not being played for laughs, and it certainly isn’t scary, then what is it? Are we now complicit in the depravity of this couple, watching two people push themselves to inhuman lengths for money? It sure as hell feels like it, and the last thing I want to feel from a movie is guilt. It’s one thing watching a big, dumb, hockey-mask-wearing killing machine carve up teenagers, or Arnold mow down a hundred terrorists with a machine gun. Those are tonally consistent; they’re designed to do something, and they do it. But this? No. This fundamentally misunderstands what a black comedy is. Heathers, Very Bad Things, The War Of The Roses, Death To Smoochy; these movies understand that the sickness and depravity has to be leavened with absurdity and OTT atmosphere. They feel just one step off reality, so the darkness never feels real. You can’t take it seriously. This movie does not understand that. And nowhere is it more evident than in the movie’s terrible, soul-killing climax and denouement that turns this movie into a Shakespearean tragedy. The guy convinces the greedy asshole to kill the down on his luck husband for all the money … but the wife has convinced the husband to do the same thing. The asshole can’t do it, but the husband can, shooting his old friend twice, once at point blank range in the head. The final shot of the movie is the husband coming home, dumping out quarter mil, and holding his toddler as his wife looks at him, covered in blood and missing a finger, in horror. Are we supposed to be happy he saved his family by committing murder and adultery in one night? Sad at his downfall? HOW IS THIS FUNNY?!? It isn’t. It’s a fucking travesty. It’s a terrible movie. Mean-spirited, caustic, hate-filled, misanthropic, cynical, and joyless. There is nothing redeeming about this movie. There is nothing to enjoy. When it ends, you won’t feel uplifted by a great cinematic experience. You’ll wonder what’s wrong with the people who made this movie. Why they like not only reveling in misery, but forcing others to endure it. And you’ll worry that these people roam the earth with us.