Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		1.0

Movie 43 Blu-ray Movie Review

Stop reading here and forget this movie even exists.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater June 22, 2013

What does the "43" stand for? I don't know. Maybe it's the number of times you'll want to stab yourself in the eyes with that pair of rusty scissors from Antichrist after watching what might just be the most audience-insulting, talent-wasting movie to have ever been shat out of Hollywood. How bad is it? So bad that Halle Berry now has a worse movie than Catwoman on her resume. And she's only one out of more than two dozen A and B-listers who humiliate themselves here in a series of career-low sketch "comedy" vignettes that try desperately to shock, offend, and disgust, but really only manage to bore.

Two questions naturally emerge from any viewing of Movie 43: How, and why, God, why? The blame should fall on the producer/director team of Charles B. Wessler and Peter Farrelly, who've been working together since Dumb and Dumber, and who conceived of this project as "a Kentucky Fried Movie for the modern age." Presumably calling in every favor stored up between them, the two somehow attracted a cast that includes industry titans Richard Gere, Naomi Watts, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, and Terrence Howard—among many others— and recruited directors like Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand), James Gunn (Slither), and Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) to oversee the individual segments. The end result is a tasteless and loud procession of R-rated middle school humor that's inexplicably targeted at adults. Movie 53 isn't just bad, it's aggressively bad, and the most offensive thing about it is that it treats you, the viewer, like an idiot.

The opening joke in the film is about how Isabella Rosellini has particularly odious cheese farts due to lactose intolerance, which should give you some idea of what you're in for. The frame-story set-up here is that a nutso screenwriter—played by Dennis Quaid—has conned his way into the office of a bigwig movie producer (Greg Kinnear), whom he holds at gunpoint whilst describing the various sordid and gonzo scenes in his script, which he promises will be "this century's Howard the Duck." The infamous George Lucas-produced flop was once described by Leonard Maltin as a "hopeless mess...a gargantuan production which produces a gargantuan headache," and the same can be said of Movie 43's asinine sketches.

The first stars Kate Winslet as a well-to-do socialite who gets set up on a blind date at a fancy restaurant with New York's most eligible bachelor (Hugh Jackman), a lawyer who volunteers for the Special Olympics and who appears on the cover of "Gotham" magazine with the headline, "Why is this man still single?" Spoiler alert: It's because he has a big hairy scrotum hanging below his chin. He spills butter on his anterior ballsack. He drops pubes into his vichyssoise. He unintentionally rubs his neck-nuts against Winslet's cheek while they pose uncomfortably for a picture. And that's the gist of most of the segments; start with an oh no they didn't gimmick and repeat the gag ad nauseum. Sometime literally.

Take the sketch with Parks and Rec's Chris Pratt, who goes to propose to his girlfriend (Anna Faris) only to find out that her greatest sexual desire is to be pooped on. (Cue the inevitable laxatives-and-burritos joke.) Or the bit with Kick Ass' Chloë Grace Moretz as a junior high girl who gets her first period on her first date, bleeding all over the couch and walls at her horrified boyfriend's house. Or the cringe-worthy scene with Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant playing a game of Truth-or-Dare that escalates from her blowing out a blind kid's birthday candles to him getting a penis tattoo on his cheek and reconstructive surgery to make him look like a derogatory Asian caricature. In between, she douches with hot sauce and gets lip-swelling saline injections.

It's not all disgusting; some of it is just dumb. Gerard Butler as a foul-mouthed leprechaun? A storybook fairy who trades fellatio for gold coins? An "iBabe" music player—a naked, full-sized android woman with an iPod in her stomach—whose "vagiport" keeps mangling teenaged boys' genitals? Richard Gere is in that last one—he plays a Steve Jobs-type CEO—and he looks visibly embarrassed to be there. Rightfully so.

What's particularly sad is that there are a few skits with semi-clever premises that are botched by so-so execution. I'm thinking particularly of "Homeschooled," in which Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber try to give their sheltered teenaged son the "normal high school experience" by humiliating and alienating him. (They throw parties and don't invite him, make fun of his "weird pubes"—I think this is the first time I've used the word "pubes" twice in a review—and call him various homophobic/insulting slurs.) It could've been comic gold, but there's something off about it; it's just not as funny as it should be. The same goes for "Superhero Speed Dating," featuring Batman (SNL's Jason Sudekis) playing Cyrano de Bergerac to his Robin (Justin Long), who's struggling in his speed-dating rounds with Super Girl (Kristen Bell) and Lois Lane (Uma Thurman). The film itself it like a particularly disappointing speed-dating session; you keep hoping the next skit will be better than the last, but at the end of the night, you realize you've wasted an hour and a half of your life.

Movie 43 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Movie 43 was shot over a few years—in order to accommodate the schedules of its stars—but the project maintains a mostly consistent appearance, picture quality-wise, shot almost entirely with Red One digital cameras. (There are one or two shorter shorts that look to have been shot on what was probably less expensive gear.) The film's 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation seems true to source—no blatant DNR or edge enhancement, no obvious compression issues—but Movie 43 isn't exactly a stunner, mostly because of the cheap-looking "comedy movie" lighting, which tends to be flat and often overly bright. The sense of clarity is usually quite strong, though, with visible fine detail almost always visible in the actors' faces, hair, and clothing. (The soft shots that are here seem to be the result of less-than-precise focus-pulling.) Aside from some blown-out highlights here and there, there are no major color problems; adjusting for the variances in color grading between each vignette, contrast is stable, saturation is good, and skin tones balanced. Overall, a great Blu-ray presentation of a visually uninteresting movie.

Movie 43 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Likewise, the audio here is solid but strictly functional, with bare-bones sound design that does what it needs to do and not much more. The disc's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is mostly sharp and clear—aside from a few moments when the normally clean dialogue seems oddly thick, for the lack of a better word—but there's little in the way of immersion or engagement from the rear channels beyond some light ambience and a few occasional effects. And that's fine. This is a hokey sketch comedy, not some whiz-bang action movie. No real problems here. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in easy-to-read white lettering.

Movie 43 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Alternate Cut (HD, 1:38:04): Via seamless branching you'll find an alternate cut of the film that features the same sketches, but with a completely different frame story about three teenagers who go searching for a "banned" movie hidden deep within the internet and end up triggering WWIII. It's worse than it sounds.
• Find Our Daughter (HD, 4:45): A cut short—ironically, better than just about all of the ones in the finished film—with Julianne Moore and Tony Shalhoub as the parents of a missing girl who has her breasts out in all the photos they're showing the investigators. Too subtle, I guess.
• Theatrical Trailer (HD, 2:23)
• Sneak Peek (HD, 7:26)

Movie 43 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Movie 43 is already being hailed as one of the worst Hollywood movies ever—and you'll hear no objection from me—but keep in mind that it's bad bad, not so-bad-it's-good bad. Bad as in increasingly hard to sit through bad. Bad as in I need to watch something else as a cinematic palette cleanser after that bad. Worse, the next time you see Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, or Richard Gere in some prestige drama, you're gonna think of them in Movie 43, utterly humiliating themselves. Don't give in to the urge to see just how awful it is; let's all just collectively forget that Movie 43 ever happened.