Movie Review: “InAPPropriate Comedy” is inept at landing laughs

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At long last, a sketch comedy film for those who found the later “Scary Movie” installments, and “Movie 43” to be entirely too highbrow for their tastes.

Is there an app for that?

A collection of racially insensitive and sexually off-color gags that don’t so much test comedy’s boundaries as make you wonder how bad the gags they threw out were, “InAPPropriate Comedy” is the one and only time in cinema history where you’ll see both Oscar winner Adrien Brody’s name in the credits alongside Lindsay Lohan’s.

The first joke that doesn’t work is the title, a play on cell phone applications. The connecting device here is a phone where you can punch up the “Flirty Harry” app – Brody, as a gay, pink Capri-pants wearing Dirty Harry — or “Blackass,” a black ensemble version of “Jackass,” or “The Porno Review,” which pairs up Rob Schneider (as in, “Whatever happened to…”) and Michelle Rodriguez as a critics passing judgment on an assortment of comically bad porn films.

A bit that works – the “Blackass” guys racing dumpsters downhill until they a sewage treatment plant. Another? “The Porno Review” passing judgment on a Japanese film – dubbed with ineptly mismatched dialogue.

Stereotypes are the source of much of the “fun” here, most of them in Ari Shaffir’s many segments under the app “The Amazing Racist.” He dons KKK robes, or dresses as a priest and tries to get shoppers at a Jewish grocery store to sign a petition “apologizing for killing Jesus.” He puts on slave-trader garb and dolls up an assistant as a Roman slave galley overseer and tries to convince black people to accept “a free, one-way boat ride back to Africa.”

Watermelon and fried chicken are the added enticements to that voyage. Come on, he says, things are great in Africa.

“Everybody shows up ten minutes late and talks all the way through the movie!”

Sacha Baron Cohen would have made that funny. He would have taken the risk to the next level – maybe staging fights with the offended, but also including footage of people he actually ambushed, in character, and getting their reactions.

Shaffir, who earns points for novelty, doesn’t have the guts to try it that way. Everyone he “confronts,” from “Mexicans” he wants to trick into surrendering to Border Patrol, to the Yarmulke wearers in the market to the people of color he annoys in front of his leaky boat, is an actor. And one who can’t improv his or her way out of this jam.

Nor can he.

The Brody bits haven’t a laugh in them and make you wonder what he found funny in all the broad gay sex innuendos, and Lindsay Lohan, dressed like Marilyn Monroe wearing a court-ordered ankle bracelet, looks sad and unhealthy.

Which fits “InAPPropriate Comedy” to a T. Surely, there’s a phone app that could text a funnier script than this.

MPAA Rating: R for strong crude and sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive language and drug use

Cast: Adrien Brody, Ari Shaffir, Rob Schneider, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan

Credits: Directed by Vince Offer. A Square One release.

Running time: 1:22

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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2 Responses to Movie Review: “InAPPropriate Comedy” is inept at landing laughs

  1. nigel dorsett says:

    Sorry I know I should not of laughed but after several beers and a few spliffs my girlfriend and I laughed and laughed. This is not a film to watch sober. Crack a brew light a phat one and enjoy. Having said that scary movie 5 is as funny as HIV sober or stoned. One love.

  2. Ras Trent says:

    Crap movie but Ari Shaffir was hilarious.

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