Review of Bottle Rocket (1996) by Pablo V — 22 Jan 2010

Because of his later achievments it's easy to forgive this immature and poorly excecuted debut by soon to be genius Wes Anderson, which only contained sparse elements of what was to later make him one of the finest film makers in modern cinema.

The main problem with this film was the lack of depth in its characters, which was instead replaced by gimmicky trademarks in their personalities and irrelevent eccentricities; much like how Seth Rogan shlops together a character so shamelessly today.

Evidently, this film is not nearly as bad as anything done by Rogan because it did contain some redeaming elements in the direction, as Anderson gave us a teaser of his later trademarks in the sometimes snappy dialouge and the mise en scene. This came most notably from his artistic focus on normally bland inanimant objects and the wonderful, almost animation like colourization of his settings and characters.

The humour of the film is also based on the relatively funny premise of 3 middle class screw ups trying to prepare and excecute a heist, but none of them were captivating enough for me to really care about their objectivives or past lives and ultimately left me unfulfiled during the languid climax.

Owen Wilson was somewhat funny at times, but the rest of the cast contained a sort of meaningless aura about them as they acted as two dimensional pupets to a bunch of lukewarm punchlines.

This film is on the cusp of watchability, but is certainly not something I would recomend to a discriminate film buff, nor would I recomend it as a light hearted watch for those in search of good humour, it's just not funny enough to make it a good film.