Item: Game Over, Man!
Rating: 2.1
Author: William Bibbiani

There’s a school of comedy that says if a scene isn’t funny, just get louder. Or get crasser. Or just start gesticulating wildly. It’s a not a prestigious school, but if you ever wanted to audit a class, it’s as easy as watching Game Over, Man!, which launches on Netflix on March 23.

Game Over, Man! comes from the creators of the television series Workaholics, and stars Adam Devine, Anders Holm and Blake Anderson as the the cleaning staff at a fancy hotel, where a wealthy celebrity named Bey Awadi (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is having an enormous party that night. Our heroes decide to use this opportunity to pitch Bey Awadi one of their many entrepreneurial schemes, the “Skintendo,” which uses a full body suit to control the character in a game.

Setting aside that they just invented a clunkier version of the Kinect and a lamer version of motion-capture, Bey Awadi finds their antics amusing and gives them $200,000. Unfortunately the party is then taken hostage by bad guys Conrad (Neal McDonough) and Irma (Rhona Mitra), and now those losers have to access their inner John McClane to kill all the criminals and get their check back.

“Die Hard With Losers” isn’t a bad idea, which is probably why it’s been done so many times before. Remember Paul Blart: Mall Cop? Game Over, Man! is a lesser version of Paul Blart: Mall Cop. It is, however, more-or-less on par with Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, a comedy which - in a bizarre piece of synergy - also co-stars Neal McDonough as a terrorist who takes over a hotel.

Game Over, Man Images

The biggest problem with Game Over, Man! is that these losers deserve to lose. They’re shrill, antagonistic, selfish a-holes with bad ideas, no sense of shame, no consideration for others, who learn almost nothing over the course of the movie. They’re not bad people who get better. They’re just bad people. Imagine the worst college roommate ever, multiple him by three, and give them their own movie where they get to murder lots of people and show you their privates without warning. At worst, it’s an ugly experience. At best, it gets old extremely fast.

There is one good scene in Game Over, Man! in which our “heroes” get in one of their usual yelling matches. But of course, by this point in the movie they all have guns, and since they’re all overgrown children with no consideration for themselves, others, or anybody’s personal safety, they start shooting at each other instead of the bad guys. It’s a moment of lunacy that is unexpected and yet naturally stems from the characters and their situation. It is, quite simply, a decent joke.

But the rest of Game Over, Man! relies on lazier humor, a sort of “look how gross we are” mentality that can’t carry a whole film even when it’s done well. In Game Over, Man! almost every scene plays like it was written just a few minutes before they started shooting. Almost nothing feels polished, or even rehearsed. And that’s not very entertaining to watch.

Verdict

Game Over, Man! is a sloppy production, with screaming and bullying used as a placeholder for actual jokes. The characters are such enormous jerks that they probably don’t deserve to succeed, at anything, so it’s hard to want to follow their adventures through an entire film.