Review of Mystery Team (2009) by Jesse O — 30 May 2016

I know this movie probably has a cult following thanks to Donald Glover finding success in the television series Community, which is a cult series in and of itself, but this movie just really isn't that good.

I'm not gonna say that it isn't without its laughs or its inspired moments, but the concept of three 18-year-olds acting like they're ten years younger than their actual age and trying to solve trivial crimes like who stole this girl's diary, stupid shit like that.

The concept is funny for, oh, about maybe five minutes. There's also something about this concept that seems more suited to a YouTube series with, as mentioned, five-minute episodes. I don't wanna say the movie struggles to find comedy in its concept, but once the joke about them being 18 and acting like little kids wears thin, the jokes that they do throw out there aren't really what I would call smart or interesting.

There's no way this movie should've gone as long as it did and you can see them almost struggling to stretch the plot out to fill out an entire movie's worth of content. And that's really the biggest problem, there's nothing about this film, the story or its characters that really justifies it going slightly over 90 minutes and that's entirely on Donald Glover, who co-wrote the film with his co-stars DC Pierson, Dominic Dierkes and Dan Eckman (just the director of thefilm), they're all part of this sketch comedy group.

Now I'm not saying that, collectively, they aren't a very funny sketch comedy group, but this isn't a sketch movie and perhaps they would've been better suited writing a sketch movie than a film with an actual narrative.

I don't think those four, at that point in their careers, could have written a full-length film that actually was any good. And the proof is in the cut of this flick. It's just not a good movie.

And they try to distract you from the fact that it's not a good movie by using gross-out gags that are meant to be 'comedic'. I'm not saying a movie can't be raunchy and be funny at the same time, Superbad is a perfect example.

But raunchiness works better in tandem with great writing, where you don't completely rely on dick, sex and poop jokes to get your point across. And this movie completely relies on the raunch in order to carry it and it just doesn't work.

I don't think I can stress it enough that the raunchiness just isn't enough to make this movie good. I will give them points, because, at the very least, the cast is energetic and they seemed to have a good time making this movie.

But that can only get you so far before you have to put in an actual effort at writing actual jokes and not just relying on what's easiest to pull off. At best, this is a watchable movie. And it's barely just watchable.

Even with that said, it's not like I would say that this is a good movie. It doesn't have enough comedy to make its concept work, its structure also leaves a lot to be desired and its reliance on raunchy comedy is just plain lazy.

It misses the mark on, pretty much, every point. I can't really recommend this movie. I really can't. I'm sure it's gonna be someone else's cup of tea, but it just did absolutely nothing for me.

It was a bad movie elevated by an energetic cast. Still kind of a bad movie.