One marriage, two movie reviews: Bad Trip

Tiffany Haddish as Trina Malone in Bad Trip. Photo / Netflix

SCORES
Number of acts: 3
Number of protagonists: 2
Number of reviewers with a Masters in screenwriting: 1

SHE SAW
I recently had a discussion with my prank-obsessed 7-year-old about fun pranks versus not-fun pranks. For me, fun pranks are a bit like right-wing environmentalists - I've heard they exist but I've never met one. That was until I saw Bad Trip on Netflix. I'm not saying I didn't want to spend a good portion of the movie crawling down into the gap in the couch where lost pens, hair ties and stale crackers live - the prank movie is, after all, my least favourite movie genre - but I was both amused and quite charmed by this film.

Bad Trip stars Eric André as a down-on-his-luck juice bar worker who, after running into his high school crush, convinces his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) to accompany him on a road trip from Florida to New York City so he can profess his love to her. Tiffany Haddish is frighteningly believable as Bud's convict sister Trina, who breaks out of jail to find the best friends have taken her car. She spends the remainder of the film maniacally wielding a staple gun and convincing innocent bystanders she's going to murder those men when she finds them.

There's a reason the unsuspecting public don't recognise Haddish - who has to be one of the most well-known comedians in America right now. The film was shot way back in the before times: 2017 and 2018. It faced a number of hurdles on its way to the cinema even before Covid gunked up the distribution cycle (and everything else) last year and so its eventual release on streaming platforms was just last week.

The thing that ultimately won me over in spite of everything that made my stomach churn was the overall goodness of the prankees. In almost all of the pranks, bar a couple of precarious run-ins, good people showed themselves, and there's a hopefulness in that. Unlike in Borat, these pranks are not intended to uncover the worst of humanity; in fact they do the opposite. There are still a few pranks in Bad Trip that feel mean, but overall the movie does go some way to making an argument that there is such a thing as an ethical prank - one which, when all is weighed up, comes out on the side of good. In fact, I could use this film to help teach that lesson to my 7-year-old prankster - if only it wasn't so filthy, violent and crass.

HE SAW
By the end of the opening scene, when Eric André's overalls are sucked off by a vacuum cleaner at a car wash, leaving him publicly naked, I was confused. Having known nothing about this film in advance, I'd assumed from the title it would be an unfunny road movie. Instead, it appeared to be an unfunny hidden camera movie.

In the next scene, though, Bud - one of the film's twin protagonists - is robbed at his place of work, by his sister, in a brilliantly staged, quite scary and very funny scene. Lil Rel Howery as Bud is a hilariously flat, downbeat, put-upon nerd, and Tiffany Haddish, as his sister Trina, is a terrifying psycho. Only minutes into a movie at which I had expected only to snort derisively, I was snorting appreciatively.

From there, it's a roller coaster. Some of the set-pieces are brilliant, some a bit weak, some a bit long-winded, but many times the movie made me laugh, sometimes quite hard, and that's not something that happens often in my life.

Outside the hidden camera stunts, the connective tissue of the narrative is pretty weak, the acting patchy; thematically and morally, the film fails to cohere. So what? Do you ride a roller coaster for the quality of the scenery? I couldn't have given two hoots whether Haddish murdered her brother or André got the girl, and I didn't care that I didn't care. No one gets to tell me what a good movie is, not even Zanna, who loves to lord over me her Masters in screenwriting with First Class Honours and her resultant unerring belief in the primacy of three-act structure. (Zanna disputes these last two claims.)

To that, I say, and have always said - although never to Zanna - phooey. The only way forward is revolution. Tear up the script. Free yourself to work outside the boundaries. Make messy, imperfect movies in which the only thing that matters is passion. Be wild and free. If we believe in rules in art, then can we really be said to be creating art? And if we're not creating art, what are we creating?

These are all good and powerful questions, but they are questions I would never ask Zanna. Not saying I have no interest in listening to a well-argued, historically and psychologically accurate lecture on a particular mode of filmmaking, but I'd much rather a ride a roller coaster.