What do Piranha and Dinner for Schmucks have in common? Not a lot, really. One’s a horror film about killer fish with really big teeth, the other isn’t. One’s a comedy about a callous dinner game to find (and mock) the biggest idiot, the other … isn’t. But they both opened last weekend in local cinemas, and they both illustrate a certain tendency, something we see all the time in multiplex movies though it’s hard to put a name to it. Is it muddle? A lack of follow-through? Maybe just an impatience with telling familiar stories – both films are remakes; that’s another thing they have in common – leading them to jazz things up with eye-catching irrelevance.
It’s easier to forgive in Piranha, both because the story’s more generic – killer fish with really big teeth, in this case attacking a lake resort during Spring Break – and because the film belongs in an honourable tradition of B-movies that go special-effects crazy in the final act. I’m thinking of The Thing (the 1982 remake, not the 50s original) and Society (1989), two films that tread well-worn paths – sci-fi and paranoia thriller, respectively – then happily explode into prosthetic anarchy.
Piranha does that too (only CGI instead of prosthetic), using the scene when the killer fish finally attack to unleash an orgy of splatter effects, ranging from the merely grisly to the creatively disgusting. Runner-up prize goes to the very sick bit where a woman’s long hair gets entangled in a speedboat propeller, causing the hair to be pulled off – taking her scalp and facial skin along with it – when the speedboat departs, but the winner has to be the half-eaten woman who’s being carried away by two rescuers and simply disintegrates in two, leaving each rescuer holding half a woman (the half with the head looks baffled for a moment, then expires). It’s gross, but at least it’s imaginative – and a structure that goes from escalating suspense to total gross-out is at least a structure.
Before it ups the ante, Piranha is mildly enjoyable, with the usual teasing hints of coming horror – the piranhas picking off a swimmer here, a diver there – a manic cameo by Christopher Lloyd as an excitable ichthyologist, a 3D gloss that doesn’t really add much (as usual), and a sky-high skin quotient. Girls sunbathe in tiny swimsuits, three boys moon the camera with “Kiss My Ass” painted on their asses, and – in the most unexpected scene – two mermaid-like porn stars perform an underwater pas de deux that’s really quite beautiful.
If there’s a constant motif, it’s the human body – bodies exposed, caressed and brutalised, ogled and photographed (by porn king Derrick, played by Jerry O’Connell) then hacked to bits by killer fish with big teeth. Someone should write a Ph.D thesis, and probably will. In the meantime we have a film that comes on like generic B-movie (remaking Joe Dante’s 1978 Piranha) then takes off into splatter, as if determined to show you something you’ve never seen before: a large, floppy human penis floating in the water, sampled – then spat out – by a passing piranha. Careful, readers. Once you’ve seen it, you can never un-see it.
The same could be said of Dinner for Schmucks, though the premise is mildly promising: a nice guy (Paul Rudd) must attend a monthly dinner where everyone finds an unsuspecting idiot and brings them along to be mocked by the other guests. Given how much modern comedy seems to depend on laughing at stupid people – Borat, The Office, arguably Jackass, Big Brother and the cult of Paris Hilton – there’s a place for a clever comedy that’ll deconstruct that. But the idiot our hero runs into (played by Steve Carell) is too shapeless, turning into a series of plot contrivances.
First he’s just naive, deeply impressed when Rudd opines that “Everything happens for a reason” (he’s never heard it before). Then he’s creepy, making dioramas out of dead, stuffed mice. Then he’s a nerd with no sense of privacy. Then he’s virginal and sex-phobic – though it turns out he used to be married, which makes no sense at all. He’s “a tornado of destruction”, the point being (of course) that he turns Rudd’s life upside down – at which point (of course) the film tries to play him for pathos, and wants us to care that his feelings have been hurt.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Dinner for Schmucks is a remake of a French film called The Dinner Game – but Dinner Game was 80 minutes long, whereas Schmucks is 114. That extra half-hour is the sign of a film spinning its wheels, trying to kick-start its plot with ever more outlandish devices – a Teutonic tycoon, a self-obsessed artist (Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords), an IRS agent who practises mind control in a book called ‘Your Mind Is My Puppet’, and of course the dinner itself, with ventriloquists, psychics and other assorted ‘idiots’.
Some of this stuff is amusing, but most of it didn’t need to be there: it’s what happens when a film can’t follow through on a simple story, and tries to compensate by turning it into a complicated story. Watching these films, you start to wonder if Hollywood has lost it – lost the ability to shape an effective narrative because movies have become about sensation (narrative is for TV shows), and stories get bloated into nothingness. I vote for more simplicity, like the guy in Piranha when he talks about the piranhas: “They’re killing machines,” he admits, “but they’re still fish”.
