Review of Swiss Army Man (2016) by Titaniumdragon — 22 Sep 2017

Never have I seen a movie more obsessed with farting and masturbation.

This is a weird, weird movie, which I think you might have guessed from the trailer. Where this movie fails is in its pacing. This is a very, very slow-paced movie, despite being quite short. The first 20 minutes or so of the movie are consumed by the main character talking to himself and an inexplicably useful corpse; it takes until a good bit into the movie for the corpse to start talking back. From there, things get increasingly weird as the corpse, lacking human memories, has to have everything explained to it, which takes a turn towards the perverse, showing just what sorts of thing the living protagonist has on their mind.

Alas, the weirdness is not really enough to carry the movie through its slow pacing; very little actually happens, and while the trailer makes it look like the corpse's special abilities are going to be used a great deal, most of the things that the corpse ultimately does are actually *in* the trailer. Thus, while the movie sells itself on that strange premise, a lot of the movie is really about the shy protagonist struggling to demonstrate his personal value as, well, a person, via explaining what life is like to the talking corpse.

While the movie does pick up a bit from its initial very slow pacing, it never stops being very weird and full of bathroom humor - farts play a major role in the movie, as do erections, and the characters bond a bit while talking about masturbation. This, combined with the general slow pacing, ultimately proved extremely offputting to me, and while the movie tries to go for an emotional payoff with some of the twists at the end, the movie as a whole doesn't really feel coherent. Is it a comedy? Yes, sort of. Is it a drama? Also yes, sort of. But it never really manages to pull off either - I never laughed at the movie, and often ended up cringing instead, while the drama felt kind of generic, without any particularly interesting spin on it - the protagonist is a loser who doesn't really seem to be proactive about making his life better, why should we care?

In the end, I suspect that people who enjoy cringe comedies might get something out of this, but if cringey humor, farting, erections, and discussions about masturbation put you off, this is not the movie for you.