Kyle Newacheck’s ‘Game Over, Man!’ is like a smiling, playful labrador retriever that doesn’t understand how dumb and clumsy it is
Die Hard has gone through many iterations of pop culture reverence and critical reappraisal. What was once a guys’ action flick whose name the male cast members of Friends would vapidly shout at each other as some sort of affirmation of masculinity has since been re-evaluated as a bonafide representation of male melodrama. From famed film scholar Linda Williams to similarly revered cultural academic Thomas Elsaesser, Die Hard has been heralded as a quintessential exercise in melodramatic tropes, rivaling even those of Douglas Sirk and his contemporary pastiche-laden protégé of sorts, Todd Haynes. It’s quite the timeline to a film that at first had people rolling their eyes while they munched on salty, stale popcorn. But it didn’t take long for the film to do just what it did to Joey, Chandler, and Ross, inspiring extreme fandom and culture relevancy.
It’s a film that has certainly inspired generations to try and recreate the magic that Bruce Willis, John McTiernan and some especially vindictive German terrorists created in the infamous Nagatomi skyscraper in the radiance of L.A. From Air Force One to Cliffhanger, a wide variety of progenies have come out of the formula that Die Hard originally envisioned nearly 30 years ago. Unfortunately, it seems that director Kyle Newacheck and his Workaholics buds Adam DeVine, Anders Holms, and Blake Anderson have missed the mark on their action-comedy parody which comes off as a muddled mess.
Similar to the set up of their infamous Comedy Central TV show, Workaholics, the three pseudo-frat boys are working dead-end, meaningless jobs which they consistently blow off via salvia, alcohol, and other mind altering substances. Except instead of being thankless telemarketers, they’ve now donned the role of thankless hotel cleaners. As they disinfect, wipe, and soak up the usual hotel messes (all combined with their usual albeit unusually stale brand of semen, fart, and dick jokes), it becomes increasingly clear that Adam DeVine’s character (whose name is the unoriginal porn moniker Alex with three x’s attached as a suffix) is just not pulling his weight in working toward the group’s tangible get-rich-quick schemes.
This makes up most of the group’s arguments and characterizations, which is as hackneyed and as predictable as any other raunchy guys’ comedy. Which is unfortunate, for the group’s first foray into filmmaking was highly anticipated after their runaway success on their hit TV show, Workaholics. What was once seen as original and earnest in its portrayal of aimless post-college existentialism has now been transformed to sad, aimless thirty-something ennui. These guys were suppose to grow up years ago and yet it seems that they are still stuck doing the only thing they know how to do—drink, do drugs, and fail. But what audiences will see here is yet another rehashing of the shenanigans of yore, except instead of 22 minutes, it’s a painstaking 110. The dynamic is just not as funny as it used to be, instead coming off as false and bland.
But that seems to be beside the point. It becomes increasingly clear that all of the film’s characterizations and narrative arcs are put aside once the Die Hard references begin coming in droves. It seems that the entire reasoning behind this film’s creation was to comically riff on the stylization, diegesis, and characterizations of Die Hard. From the overt nods to the movie’s tropes, and yes, even the title of the Bruce Willis flick, to the repurposed heroic actions of the protagonists, Game Over, Man! takes an innumerable amount from the Die Hard model and yet adds nothing new. Audience’s shouldn’t have had to be primed on the reference by actually referencing it—it should be natural and easy going, not hammer-fisted over our heads.
Perhaps one of the only redeemable qualities of the film’s attempt to use Die Hard as their narrative railroad is the violence. While Die Hard breezes past the extreme violence that John McClane and his enemies dole out with amoral veracity, Game Over, Man! plays with the notion that killing someone is never tidy nor gore-free. Instead, brain matter sprays, eyes are gouged and people are permanently disfigured. It may be a simplistic joke, one that isn’t all that well thought-out but one that nonetheless points to the post-modern humor that makes up much of Game Over, Man!
Unfortunately, that does not save the film from its numerous missteps. From the uninspired use of numerous celebrity cameos to the much-too-long male full frontal scene, Game Over, Man! seems to be a film that will primarily appeal to the demographic of Doritos eating, Mountain Dew drinking adolescents who will surely be cackling at the endless stream of raunchiness. Nonetheless, they too may seem the light and realize that the jokes that they so deeply loved from the show seem half-heartedly written here, with seldom any of the charm that the trio once had.
Game Over, Man! hit Netflix on Friday, March 23.
