Drive Away Dolls

I thought Madame Web was going to be my least favorite movie of the year and it didn’t even last a week at the bottom rung.

I’m skipping my usual Recommended Expectations for “Drive Away Dolls” because a pet peeve of mine is when people who clearly don’t like a genre review a genre film. In this case, one of my least favorite trends in film right now is talented filmmakers intentionally churning out B-movies. I have no problem with “Drive Away Dolls” being a goofy romp but it’s just not well made and revels in not being well made. It makes a film like “Bottoms” (which I really enjoyed and recommend checking out instead of “Drive Away Dolls”) look like high art. If I did Recxpectations for “Dolls”, it would be to expect a student film. It’s that shoddily put together. The editing seems like someone trying out every transition in the AVID and there are drug-induced interstitials that seem like someone trying to be weird as opposed to truly being off-kilter.

The Coen Brothers film it most closely resembled for me was “Burn After Reading”. My friend described that film as a long way to go for a simple punchline and “Dolls” felt the same. I’ve never checked my watch as much in a film, which is saying something as this one is only 84 minutes.

Anyway, the premise for the movie is: “In search of a fresh start, two women embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, Fla. However, things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.” “Fresh start” is doing a lot of work there as the premise is pretty shoddy.

Four years ago, I saw an evening of one-act plays from Ethan Coen; it was a hit-or-miss show but the one thing was clear, Coen loves writing different dialects and, when he misses, it’s basically because he just likes to hear his own dialogue. In “Dolls”, every performance is stilted by design as the actors try to perform Coen’s unrealistic writing. It doesn’t help that all of the characters are one-dimensional. This is not a film concerned with depth.

In the end, I guess my main beef is that this is a film that both felt try-hard and lazy. It had tics more than it had style. It was showy but had nothing to show off. The fact that it got a fairly wide release just shows how bad the start of this year is and how the strikes limited what Hollywood has to offer right now.