Review of Tusk (2014) by Ethan P — 28 Apr 2017

I really wanted to like "Tusk." The trailer was interesting, the premise is funny and I like Kevin Smith. But I don't like "Tusk." I like parts of it, but I don't like the film as a whole.

Justin Long is very good in it. He's usually funny in movies, but here he showed some genuine depth. Johnny Depp is funny to a degree. By that I mean that the idea of his character is funny, but the writing just isn't. Actually the cast was mostly good, but the writing just wasn't, which is really surprising considering that, in the past, Kevin Smith'sâ?? writing has generally outshined the performances in his films.

I think the main problem here is that the movie is based around an idea that couldn't fill up an hour and a half on its own, and so the scenes ended up being stretched way longer than they should've been. There's maybe ten scenes in this movie, and they're all just unnecessarily long conversations. And the jokes really aren't funny, and there isn't a single moment of tension. I saw that this was listed as a horror movie, and I'm not sure where the horror was.

There's also the whole issue surrounding how bad the visual effects are. I get that that's kind of the point to a certain degree, but it made the movie worse because instead of seeing a man turned into a walrus behaving like a walrus, I saw Justin Long in a Halloween costume, crawling around and screaming.

This is a film that's based around being weird and crazy, but there was really nothing all that weird aside from the main idea and some stupid characters. It's not like "House (1977)," where every second introduces a new strange element. It's maybe two weird things stretched over an hour and forty minutes.

I like "Tusk" in theory, and the cast tried.