By
Graig Uhlin
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Australian writer-director Yahoo Serious stars in dismal physical comedy
When the director of a film is named Yahoo Serious, no one expects that movie to be a Merchant Ivory-like production. In fact, no one expects much of anything.
And "Mr. Accident," co-written and directed by Serious, does not do much to exceed these low expectations. The film is a weak attempt at slapstick comedy, devising a series of rather standard pratfalls to besiege its main character, accident-prone maintenance man Roger Crumpkin, who is played by, but of course, Yahoo Serious.
Film-goers should always be wary of films made by Ÿber-hyphenates. When filmmakers act, direct, write and produce their own films, they are in danger of hindering the collaborative process of feature film production. While under the guidance of a talented hyphenate, the resulting film may suffer no loss of quality, at other times the filmmaker can lose the tight, creative grip over the film that one needs, with no one around to say "Dude, that sucks."
"Mr. Accident" seemingly suffers from this one-voice quality. Its plot lacks cohesiveness and succinctness - Serious throws together disparate story lines from the search for intelligent life in the universe (is it too much to ask for some here on Earth?) to out-of-place flashbacks to show the audience the uninteresting genesis of the uninteresting Crumpkin, with loose connections holding them together. Serious apparently believes in the adage "the more the merrier" but the result is only a confused, diffused film that might have been able to pull at a heartstring or two if it could have figured out how it wanted to do so.
Serious takes the same approach of overabundance to the slapstick of his limp comedy. He piles pratfall upon pratfall, hoping, one assumes, to raise the comedic stakes and laughter quotient with each successive gag. But either his timing is off, or the gags are too by-the-book, but the hilarity does not ensue.
Further, the problem is that Serious' slapstick is no more than the sum of its pratfalls. His persona and comic scenarios pale in comparison to the likes of Buster Keaton or even Chevy Chase. The reason is that behind the physical comedy of these masters was the heart of the character they were portraying, and the slapstick was the manifestation of their awkwardness within the world. The bumbling of Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, for instance, was more than just bumbling - but implied bumbling on different levels. In "Mr. Accident," the physical comedy is an afterthought, a cheap device to incite laughter, and easily dismissable as a result.
Moreover, the humor of this film seems way out of touch with what audiences expect from comedies today. The art of physical comedy has largely fallen from the limelight, giving way to toilet humor (‡ lˆ the Farrelly brothers) or loud and obnoxious (‡ lˆ Adam Sandler), and this movie seems too much like a throwback - and a poor one at that - to the old style of making people laugh. As a result, the humor comes off as tame. No one really finds the faucet breaking or the curtains catching fire as cutting edge comedy - or even funny at all.
The audience has seen it all before, and it knows the joke is coming before it gets there. Physical comedy has largely been ruined by overexposure, and often fails to surprise its audience. Yahoo Serious seems oblivious to this. He anchors his film on the old paradigms of comedy, and comes off less like Buster Keaton, and more like Carrot Top.
