Bad Trip

To Eric André’s cred­it, he makes view­ers of his new film Bad Trip wait less than three min­utes before allow­ing us a glimpse of his testicles.

His debut fea­ture as writer and pro­duc­er extends the vérité pranks he mas­tered over the years on his deranged Adult Swim talk show, thread­ing them through a bare-bones nar­ra­tive in three acts rigid­ly struc­tured by McKee’s sto­ry sem­i­nar. Suf­fice it to say that his predilec­tions for wan­ton destruc­tion, var­i­ous excre­tions, and the human body’s nether regions have not been com­pro­mised for Hollywood’s sake.

And yet his antics, how­ev­er pro­fane and destruc­tive they might still be, have a milder flavour here than in the small-screen series that made him a cult leg­end among not just alter­na­tive com­e­dy nerds, but skaters and anar­chists and drug­gies and oth­er mis­cre­ants. A pal­pa­ble punk hos­til­i­ty imbued his TV work with thrilling live-wire chaos, a sub­ver­sive streak absent from this loose col­lec­tion of hid­den-cam­era sketch­es much clos­er in intent to Punk’d than Borat.

Maybe the issue lies with the unre­mark­able road movie tem­plate guid­ing us from one sketch to the next: André plays a risk-tak­er schlub who sets out from Mia­mi to New York so he can con­front a boy­hood crush, with his but­toned-up bestie (Lil Rel How­ery) rid­ing shot­gun in the ​“Bad Bitch-mobile” they have bor­rowed from his incar­cer­at­ed sis­ter Tri­na (Tiffany Had­dish). After the volatile nut­case busts out, she sets off in dogged pur­suit, their par­al­lel paths dove­tail­ing in a grand finale that doesn’t quite earn the first word in that phrase.

Rather than push any gen­uine­ly dis­com­fit­ing but­tons, direc­tor Kitao Saku­rai would pre­fer every­one have a harm­less good time, as affirmed by the cred­it-roll footage of André show­ing delight­ed par­tic­i­pants that they’ve been caught on tape. There’s no sense of nihilis­tic ide­o­log­i­cal pur­pose behind the stunts of a man best known for antag­o­nis­ing Alex Jones and grilling Scary Spice about Thatcher’s war on the IRA. One scene rop­ing in an Army recruiter begins with André ask­ing, ​“What wars are going on?” and cul­mi­nates with him blunt­ly offer­ing, ​“I’ll suck your dick if you’ll kill me,” but ends with the two palling around.

Though André pre­vi­ous­ly found suc­cess by drag­ging his taint along the line between genius and stu­pid­i­ty, in this instance he comes down hard on the lat­ter side of that divide with gags that seek to amuse instead of scare the shit out of their unwit­ting marks. It’s not that the hijinks involv­ing a hand get­ting man­gled in a blender or an impromp­tu musi­cal num­ber in a mall food court aren’t fun­ny, because they are – it’s that after the laughs have died down, these jer­ry-rigged gotchas all seem mod­est in ambi­tion, offer­ing lit­tle more than surprise.

The tell­tale sign is that the com­e­dy comes from the observers’ reac­tions over the rou­tines them­selves, their obliv­i­ous­ness to the fak­ery being the whole point. As an ass-bar­ing Allen Funt will­ing to put him­self and his dig­ni­ty on the line for our diver­sion, André deserves his recog­ni­tion for going places few of his peers would be will­ing to go.

But the knowl­edge of how much far­ther he could have gone leaves this long-await­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty – a movie bud­get, in the hands of a mani­ac! – look­ing squan­dered on the pedes­tri­an. His hav­oc burns bright but fast, a con­trolled flame that nev­er grows into the wild­fire it should be, raz­ing every­thing in its path.