Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, and Blake Anderson hold the human penis in a similar regard as Martin Scorsese does the holy cross: it is a graven object of obsession and great fear, a totem of power and pain, an icon through which one can find salvation just as easily as damnation. In Game Over, Man!, Netflix’s new feature film from the former Workaholics man-children, phalluses are everywhere. They’re getting kicked, punched, slapped, and generally brutalized. They’re shoved into faces; sometimes this causes delight, and sometimes despair. They’re severed, thrown around, and used as weapons. In this film’s utterly deranged guiding philosophy, the dong is the essence of life.
That our ostensible heroes can shrink back in icky panic at homosexuality while being unable to go two minutes without another dick joke is only part of this film’s dense thicket of perverse contradictions. A harebrained premise pits a hit squad of domestic terrorists against the main trio in the hotel where they do janitorial work, and though the script is open about its wholesale Die Hard thievery, John McClane’s moral compass has been thoroughly corrupted. The good guys are insufferable, the bad guys are sympathetic, and the audience can’t help but root for a repellent hostage to get his brains blown out.
It’s easy enough to see the movie that the lads and their director Kyle Newacheck thought they were making. Each character has their own arc straight from the screenwriting books, sketched in easily identifiable beats. Alexxx (DeVine) is all ideas with no follow-through, and he’s impeding the group’s dream of selling their fully-bodysuit video game console called the Skintendo. Darren (Holm), disillusioned with his workaday grind, continuously vapes to isolate himself from the world around him. Most heinously, Joel (Anderson) has locked himself in a closet of glass, his suppressed sexual orientation apparent to everyone but himself. By the end of the film, of course they have all overcome these personal issues, but they’ve forgotten to generate the basic empathy that would make the audience want such an outcome.
Holm, Anderson, and DeVine have done half the work, failing to counterbalance their more grating qualities with the redemptive edge that makes such a profile endearing. They’re crass without being imaginative, dim-witted without being decent-hearted, horny without the capacity for love. Holm claims sole scriptwriting credit, and his mixed-up understanding of character dynamics extends to the other faces peopling the plush hotel containing the action. The guys’ fates all depend on an ultra-rich Instagram personality (Utkarsh Ambudkar) who agrees to finance the Skintendo promptly before the gunmen take him into custody. The story mandates his rescue, and it has to, because the so-called “Bey of Tunisia” is so singularly irritating that a viewer spends the film silently praying for his execution. The shell of Die Hard may be reconstructed here, but its soul – the winning regular-guy-ness of Bruce Willis – is nowhere to be found.
The positioning of a social media influencer as this film’s precious MacGuffin speaks to a wider, more off-putting sycophantic streak towards celebrity glitterati. The terrorists just so happen to storm the hotel on the night of a star-studded party, which provides a flimsy excuse for a series of increasingly mortifying celebrity cameos. These appearances from familiar faces don’t play on the known personae with anything intentional enough to qualify as a joke, but they pass by quick enough to steal a chuckle of recognition before it’s onto the next distraction. Look, Joel McHale’s getting stabbed in the temple with a stiletto! Electronic composer Flying Lotus’ head just exploded! Jillian Bell has soiled herself!
This film’s lazy presumption that a famous person’s face can be a workable substitute for actual writing hints at its closest predecessor. Adam Sandler has clogged the back channels of Netflix with high-concept dreck of this same strain, quick-hit comedies that devote much of their visibly modest budgets to gratuitous violence. But the Sandler movies always made sense when interpreted as an expression of their creator’s vanity, whereas the incompetence on display here feels crueler and more random. The Do-Over used special effects to turn its middle-aged star into a sprightly action hero; Game Over, Man! uses them to make a puppy explode.
Between the remorseless abuse of Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al, the stomach-churning anilingus scene, a pitiably thankless role for charming character actor Aya Cash, and an infuriating ending that presupposes this film’s success by prophesying a sequel, there’s a lot to loathe. But ultimately, it all comes back to the penis. With its inexplicable combination of phallic revulsion, fascination, and revulsion at its own fascination, this wretched film hates itself more than we ever could.
- Game Over, Man is released on Netflix on 23 March
