Going into the comedy, Movie 43, I had the same mindset that I had during my initial viewing of Ted: the movie will have a good cast, but will also have a thin plot filled with objectionable content. The difference here is that you can take everything objectionable out of Ted, and the story would still be intact. The structural integrity of Movie 43 is, sadly, solely built on these sexually offensive attempts at humor.
The story shakily follows a rough-looking Dennis Quaid as he attempts to pitch the plot for an unwatchable comedy movie. The object of this movie is a series of short tales, whose only common traits are a surprisingly overqualified cast and a considerable degree of shameless crudeness.
Most of these stories are too offensive to describe in detail, so I’ll discuss the aforementioned cast. Contributing to what is probably the best thing about this movie, Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, Elizabeth Banks, and many others, grace this otherwise unbearable movie experience. In the first sketch, Winslet captures some empathy with the audience as she becomes entrapped in an awkward scenario, caused by a sexually suggestive-looking physical deformity in Jackman’s character, noticed only by Winslet. And then the film really goes downhill.
This sort of overwhelming crudity plays throughout each of the shorts, and the sympathy one feels is only for the actors that endure them, not for their characters. Thank goodness that most of these performers have been in enough good films in the past for their careers not to be destroyed by this debacle.
In comparison to most R-rated comedies, 43 is built entirely on the embrace of repulsive content. If you pull out the instances of brazen and unapologetic raunchiness, what’s left is just a compilation of unrelated stories chronicling inelegant characters whose actions make them just too difficult to care about.
I try to be objective; the low humor might score laughs among the Will Ferrell crowd, but the only positive that I can take from this movie is its troupe of miscast talent, who shouldn’t be in it in the first place. In the end, Movie 43 is like a procrastinator doing a big project; it starts off with big energy and the potential to be something good, but loses all purpose halfway through. The result is very shoddy. Movie 43 barely gets by with one star.