One of the perks of renting films on DVD is that you get to see a lot of small films that have either had small big screen exposure or have been released straight to DVD. For some months now I kept seeing trailers on other rented DVDs advertising "Guy X", and the trailers looked promising. The trailer sold this quirky Indy film as a black comedy - a Beckett-like theatre of the absurd meets "Buffalo Soldiers". So, naturally, when it was finally released I snatched it off the shelf, eager to watch the charming Jason Biggs breaking off from his teen comedy comfort zone... and the first twenty minutes of the film looked promising. Assuming at this point that our hero, a corporal mistakenly shipped to a remote US Army outpost in Greenland instead of Hawaii, is actually the "Guy X" of the title, I ticked the boxes as each of the jokes shown in the trailer came rushing by one by one: jokes about eating puffin pies, about guarding an ammo dump against polar bears and penguins, and about a guy desperately trying to go AWOL in the wastes of Greenland... and then what? Suddenly the film becomes all serious and preachy. Suddenly it's a darker conspiracy theory thriller. Suddenly the guy you thought was "Guy X" is not "Guy X" - Guy X is some mutilated Vietnam vet being kept alive in a secret hospital underneath the base... Now all of a sudden our hero becomes all serious and noble and devotes the rest of the film to uncovering the truth... At least that's what I think was happening before I fell asleep. I feel cheated. The makers of this film have suckered in unsuspecting viewers to watch their incoherent, badly scripted conspiracy movie-with-a-message by promising a black comedy with Jason Biggs. So what do they do? They cram the few funny bits from this miserable bore into a trailer and hope for the best. I hope the losers who made this film will never be allowed to make another movie for as long as they live.
Review of Guy X
Guy X
(2005)
The trailer promises a comedy... well, don't be fooled.
13 March 2006
Warning: Spoilers