FrightFest '07: Botched

The prospect of seeing Sean Pertwee in a Russian heist-gone-wrong caper is enormously exciting. Sadly, though, he only has about two scenes, and he's putting on a Russian accent, so it's hardly worth it. And as for the rest of the movie? Well, there aren't many things more painful than a comedy that really, really isn't funny.

The basic plot is that Stephen Dorff is a rubbish criminal. After a spectacularly failed heist, he's given a chance to redeem himself: he has to steal a treasured relic from a Russian towerblock. However, because he's rubbish, he screws it all up, and during his attempt to escape the building he ends up in a broken down lift with a handful of hostages on a floor which doesn't technically exist. To make matters worse, there's a lunatic on the loose who thinks he's the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible - and by making matters worse, I mean both for the characters in the film, and for the audience.

Seems the filmmakers thought that fake Russian accents and a man dressed up for a D&D LARP added up to comedy gold, which, well, maybe it could have if they'd written some jokes or something even faintly original or clever, but they didn't. Botched is yet another comedy created by people who think comedies are easier to make than real films; and while, if you're a comedian, that might be the case, this time it just fell flat. It doesn't help that the entire movie plays out in a series of grey, characterless corridors that actually look like they only had one corridor, and they just had the characters walk into it from different places.

The title's really quite appropriate, when you think about it.

IMDB link