Caffeine

There's something about the English accent that seems to fascinate many Americans. Being an Englishman in New York, I'm amazed that not a day goes by without my boss granting me his flawless impression of how an English person speaks. It's a bizarre fetish and one which I'll never quite understand. Us Brits don't seem to share the equivalent obsession with the American way of speak.

With this constant stream of people giving you their best Britspeak, in some sort of weird cultural pissing contest, one gets highly well-versed on the art of the bad English accent. After not too long you can pick it up immediately. It grates, punishes, rapes the ear with it's awkward inaccuracy. So when a film such as Caffeine arrives, a film set in London but with a mostly American cast, an odd, uneasy feeling starts to spread…

The film takes place over one day in a London coffee shop as a wide array of 'wacky' staff members and 'quirky' customers are involved in a series of 'zany' occurrences. There's the manager Rachel (Marsha Thomason) who has just discovered her boyfriend has cheated on her and is shutting him out of the café all day. Vanessa (Mena Suvari) is trying to keep her unstable grandmother under control, something which proves nigh-on impossible as the day progresses.

Dylan (Breckin Meyer) is waiting for that all important call from his agent to let him know if his book will be published and he will be saved from serving coffee forever. The last member of staff is Tom (Mark Pellegrino) who's gay so he cries a lot and minces around. Then there's the patrons. Laura (Katherine Heigl) is suffering a nightmare blind date with a misogynistic idiot. Danny (Mike Vogel) and Mike (Andrew Lee Potts) are young guys so they do things like smoke weed, talk about porn and shit themselves. Seriously.

There's more characters but to be honest I'm bored even thinking about them, let alone actually writing about them.

Right from the early moment where Mena Suvari releases her improbably poor idea of how an English person speaks its clear we're in really, really, deviously bad movie territory. The whole idea of going all the way over to England to make a film, making sure the location seems genuinely English and then filling the cast with Americans, none of which can muster one believably English word among them is just completely insane to me.

The film is 100% inauthentic, not a moment of it even slightly fools you. Okay so it doesn't help that the script is astoundingly bad as well. The film leaps from one unbelievably stupid and crass situation to another, all the time thinking its achieving a winningly irreverent atmosphere. People talking about relationships in a frank manner is not funny enough by itself, especially when these people do totally unidentifiable things. How

to pick the worst? The guy who has a threesome with a pair of twins? The guy who accidentally flashes his penis to a young girl? The guy who dresses up in his fiance's underwear when she's out of the house? The woman who's boyfriend discovers she used to be a porn actress? You get the idea.

Quite who this is supposed to appeal to is beyond me. Guys would be bored by the relationship talk while girls would find the situations way too crass and unbelievable. And British people as a whole should be hugely offended by the whole debacle. There are only so many 'piss owf's one can take before some sort of evil, brutal revenge springs to mind.

Cheaply made and acted, Caffeine is thankfully destined to a life of anonymity. There's not many more cringe-inducing things in a film when the makers are so, desperately desperate to create a 'mad' atmosphere and it all fails miserably. By the end of the film you really do feel desensitized to stupidity. Even a crazy elderly woman trying to shoot a man dressed up as a baby does nothing. It doesn't even annoy anymore.

It's early so I'm not going to say it's the worst but Caffeine can proudly revel in the title of the most embarrassing film of the year.

Movie Grade: D-

Synopsis:

During one lunchtime at this offbeat London coffee house,
the relationships of the quirky staff and several couples are suddenly turned upside down by the sudden revelations of supremely embarrassing secrets and idiosyncrasies, generally having to do with their rampaging sexual appetites.

A neurotic young commitment-phobe runs into his ex-girlfriend while he's whacked out on killer dope;
a high strung control freak finds out that her husband-to-be is a transvestite;
a hyper-possessive boyfriend discovers that his girlfriend is an ex-porn actress;
and the manager's boyfriend has a ménage a trois which he says is forgivable because the girls were identical twins.

CAFFEINE is an eccentric comedy about these characters' hapless attempts to repair their fractured relationships as they confront issues of fidelity, betrayal, forgiveness, and commitment.