The witness to a terrible gangland slaying, the mcguffin getting those motherfucking Snakes up onto the Plane, rather ostentatiously drains a can of Red Bull as he steps off his motorbike. The audience I was with laughed–if the can had been flashing neon, we couldn’t have been more savvy consumers, fully aware of how the movie was shilling before it began. A short while later (in the quick dispensing of plot), as the witness watches a tv news report about the slaying (and just before the goons come calling to gun him down), the camera slyly includes in the frame around the tv literally stacks of Red Bull cans, all wrapped in plastic. Five minutes and most of the plot later, the witness having been saved by FBI hero Sam Jackson is being cajoled/bullied into testifying, and the good guys toss on the table some evidence of him from the scene of the slaying: encased in a baggie, a drained can of Red Bull.
I really wanted to like Snakes, but the film is an aggressively smart-ass deployment of the crude tools of B-film without any of the smarts or real pleasure the best B-films and recreations of B-films offer. The RedBull illustrates how in the know the filmmakers are, and allows us in the audience to revel in our knowledge, too. We know the big lines (hell, “we” wrote it, on the internet) and laugh and cheer appreciatively at every “motherfucker.” We’re excited by the obligatory boob, the snake to the crotch, the dispatching of people. (The film famously went into some re-shoots to increase its gore, given internet demand–and there’s at least one scene where the insert is so patently obvious I laughed at the obviousness: a guy gets snake venom sprayed in his eyes, and covers them while shrieking; cut in a shot of some horrible white foam spewing out from underneath his hands; then cut back to the foamless screaming guy. The film is chockablock full of such mechanically-realized “pleasures.”)
Hell, if I read the script outline I’d be ready for heaven. But, somehow, instead of ascension, the film sinks rather than slithers into its paces. It was almost as if the filmmakers, like me, had watched a lot of crap ’70s and ’80s monster flicks, and were carefully and self-consciously hitting all the right notes. But, unlike me, I get no sense that they experienced any joy in those notes, or understood the melody. I fully expected a “flat” plot and “thin” characters and empty dialogue. I just didn’t expect it to be so little fun. I strongly encourage those of you tempted to wait for cable (not even dvd)–what fun to be had would come best if the film was a found object, late at night. And right now, go instead find and rent and see the glorious B-film hommages of Joe Dante and John Sayles (together and respectively): Piranha, The Howling, Alligator, The Nest, and Battle from Beyond the Stars.
It seems odd, I know: I’m trying to differentiate a knowing deployment of film as product from another kind of knowing deployment of film as product. And the distinctions are, believe me, hard to nail down. But when the piranhas are about to strike the beach, having been released upriver and heading toward the big tourist spot in Dante/Sayles’ great little film, we see one guy on the sand reading Moby Dick. Now there’s a knowingness that I can buy into; there’s a sense of fun, of delight in the crass mechanized mayhem of their cheap ripoff of Jaws, that is infectious. There is no joy in Snakeville, aside from the recognition of the film as nothing but slick marketing.
This isn’t a perfect connection, but why not: let’s tie in Will Ferrell & Adam McKay’s minor pleasure about Ricky Bobby, which also throws out a series of product placements which are ‘jokes’ because they’re so obviously, baldly, badly-incorporated product placements… because somehow in that film such moments work. Applebee’s is damned funny, rather than “funny.” And I did really enjoy the film, especially the stuff about baby Jesus (that Jeff has been hinting at elsewhere) and the glory that is Sascha Baron Cohen, who somehow came up with a new way to do a silly French accent not utterly beholden to Peter Sellers. It isn’t as fullblown insane as Anchorman, which is a shame, but Talladega Nights is never less than committed to its games, and its enthusiasm and its stream of good gags made for a great afternoon.