Movie Review: Small Engine Repair

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

This may rank as one of the worst movies I had seen in a theater. 

This film is incredibly mean spirited, unpleasant and vulgar. Unfortunately these three things are all the movie is. If there was enough depth or social commentary behind all this perhaps it would be forgivable. There is not though.  As soon as we meet our main characters the problem becomes apparent. Their dialogue is completely made up of them cussing like sailors and talking too in depth about their sexual experiences. One gets the feeling that this is supposed to be funny and satirical. However there is nothing funny about anything they say. Instead this dialogue quickly becomes simply monotonous and annoying. So the fact that this is an especially dialogue heavy film does not help in the least. With this making up so much of the dialogue I found it impossible to relate to and nothing more than mean spirited male stereotypes. The problem with that is that when a character is nothing but a walking stereotype, he becomes hard to connect to enough to care about what happens. A simple stereotype can easily be a comic relief but is never capable of being a main character. At least there needs to be more to the character than the stereotypical elements. This becomes very clear when the film takes its dark and dramatic turn. After this point all we seem to be watching is terrible people doing terrible things to a terrible person. This is neither entertaining or thought provoking but just unpleasant. 

The film also suffers from a real sense of being stage bound. It is no surprise to learn this movie was based off a stage play. It feels much more like a stage play then it does a film and there is little to anything cinematic or visually interesting in this movie.

Avoid at all costs.