Amanda Peet has been heralded of late as one of the most promising young talents in Hollywood. Having used her role on the WB sitcom Jack and Jill as a springboard into parts in feature films, she proved she could handle herself up against some mighty big talent (Bruce Willis’s big name and Michael Clarke Duncan’s big stature) when she stole scenes from these two in last February’s comedy hit The Whole Nine Yards. It didn’t hurt her that she was beautiful to boot.
That’s why it’s a real shame that the next role audiences see her in is in Whipped, a one-note independent film that can’t decide if it’s trying to be funny or serious. If it’s a comedy, Whipped is short on laughs, and if it’s a drama, it provides no real insight into any of its characters’ minds. Beginning by trying to be a buddy movie and ending in trying to teach us a lesson about manipulation, Whipped fails in each of its attempts.
The plot of the film is simple: three womanizers (or scammers, as this movie dubs them) meet each week over brunch to discuss their conquests, until they all fall for the same girl. When she refuses to choose between the three of them, they each continue to date her, thus tearing apart their friendship.
The concept, a girl coming between friends, is so basic that it verges on being inane and trite (think Yoko Ono). Yet the film adheres to this premise unveeringly, even when it has obviously failed to hold the audience’s attention. The three guys argue and
bicker unendingly, and uninterestingly. Several times the trio almost come to blows... but unfortunately they don’t. A fistfight breaking out might have livened things up.
It doesn’t help anything that none of the male characters ever evolve beyond a stereotype. There’s Brad the smarmy Wall Street guy, Zeke the mysterious artist, Jonathan the excessively masturbating loser, and there’s the outsider, Eric, who’s married and hates hat he’s no longer one of the guys because of it. They each have their own very limited role to play, and this film beats each of their routine personas into the ground until it’s
totally played out and stale.
Character development is at a minimum and relies more on cliches than anything else. Zeke is artistic so he goes to coffee houses and writes screenplays. Several scenes revolve around Jonathan’s obsession with porn as the most defining quality of his being.
And the acting fails to give the characters any depth as well. For each of the scammers, the awe of meeting “the one” is conveyed by a kind of slack-jawed blank stare usually only
seen in the clinically brain dead. How any of these guys manage to get dates is beyond me, for their routines are transparently lame and their behavior moronic. Eric the married guy might as well have been known as Eric the blinking guy, for this nervous tic is his primary way of showing how flustered his marriage has made him.
Because the characters are no more than poorly drawn sketches, the comedy that arises from their dialogue is uninspired. Jonathan is the endless butt of jokes about secretly being gay simply because he is single (a fact made even more stupid when you figure in that his friends, the ones who make these jokes at his expense, know that he chronically masturbates to magazines like Juggs). Eric pulls most of his jokes about his marriage out
of the most tired stand-up routines. His wife complains about him leaving the toilet seat up? Can these jokes be any more unoriginal? The physical comedy too seems to stick with the easy route, going for a cheap chuckle more often than not. A scene in a sex toy accidentally falls into a toilet and must be retrieved tries to be raunchy and gross, as is the style in comedies of late, but its lack of originality just makes it seem stupid. The only scene that actually made me laugh is one that recognized its value as a stereotype and parodied it. The guys all meet for a game of basketball, as men in movies often do, but none of them are any good at the game.
And then there’s Mia, the girl of each of their dreams. When she enters their lives, it is also on a superficial level. She “connects” with each of them in the most perfunctory way she can: she likes what they like. The scene in which she and Jonathan bond over their love for self-gratification is exceedingly unrealistic. Mia at times seems to be a victim of circumstance, at others a shrewd manipulator. When the film finally decides in the end that it chooses the latter, the character seems empty of real feeling, again just one character in the same mold as many others. Amanda Peet fails to rise above the role she’s in and shows none of the spark she has previously demonstrated in her other work. But then again, Whipped was filmed long before The Whole Nine Yards was. Perhaps she can be more choosy now in which roles she decides to play; hopefully this film won’t ruin those
chances for her.
You can’t help feeling that Whipped has been a waste of your time once the final credits have rolled, no more than a pointless exercise in formula filmmaking. Independent films like this one are supposed to be more daring and inventive, not imitative and banal. (Apparently some of the audience members came to this conclusion long before I did; four of the twelve people in the theater left halfway through the film.) Perhaps, as the film tries to say in its closing, the point is that these guys think they’re hot but are not and needed to be brought down a notch. But if that’s the lesson they must learn, then Mia, their teacher, failed in her objective. These three are out there pulling off the same old pathetic scams; they’re just not friends anymore.
If you want a movie about a group of male friends picking up women that is actually hip and clever, rent Swingers. If you want a comedy about scammers having the tables turned on them, rent How To Be A Player. If you want a serious and disturbing look into the cold-hearted manipulation some men are capable of, rent In the Company of Men. What you don’t want, I promise you, is to see this film.
