Waiting – Unrated & Raw
Picture: C+ Sound: B- Extras: C- Film: C-
Some films want to be bad and they know it, obnoxious and
outrageous to no end. This has been
especially true with the latest grossout cycle of films and Waiting
(2005) is a later entry in the now-declining cycle. Ryan Reynolds, who keeps doing mostly awful work until Warner can
get him into The Flash feature film that is taking forever to get going,
he is stuck doing junk like this and Just Friends. This will go over as one of the biggest
failures.
He is among a cast of new actors playing servers in a
corporate chain restaurant where the workers are underpaid, overworked and very
unhappy. They have self-hate, act goofy
and love to contaminate the food of who they judge to be ignorant
customers. The film is sold as a
grossout film over “something wrong with the food” and that could be the name
of a current subgenre. The jokes are
unfunny, though the film thinks they are, the script tired and actors
wasted. The only reason this is not
worse is because it is amazing how the film makes the wrong choices at every
turn. It has not been a big hit, even
among its intended target audience and even ends with a Rap song, one of the
worst in the history of the genre.
The 1.78 X 1/16 X 9 anamorphically enhanced image is
strange and this film has had a history of being odd looking. Definition is a problem, the colors are a
little off and the whole thing looks on the cheap side. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is not bad, but
most of this is bad music and bad jokes.
Oddest of all are the extras, which are spread over two DVDs when one
could have fit all this. I guess
Lionsgate expects this to play on cheaper DVD players. The film is repeated in its entirety on DVD
2 with the audio commentary by writer/director Rob McKittrick and co-producer
Jeff Balis includes Telestrator markings on the screen as if they were talking
about a football game’s play. This
could have been done on DVD 1, but the studio decided not to trust the format,
because this version makes the film go on even longer (!!!) as they pause the
film to discuss it!!! Several
featurettes, trailers for this and other Lionsgate titles and some
outtakes/deleted scenes round out the set.
Don’t “wait” on this one.
- Nicholas Sheffo
