Mr. Woodcock

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Wow, what a boring movie. Despite being shoved around the release schedule for the better part of two years, I had decent-sized hopes for Mr. Woodcock, which has a fair amount of starpower and a concept I didn't think sounded too bad. Seann William Scott stars as a successful young self-help author, recovered from the years of abuse from his middle-school gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton). When he goes home during a book tour, his anger floods back when he finds that his mother, played by Susan Sarandon, is dating Woodcock.

A movie can be about pretty much anything and still be really funny, and of all the possible concepts in the world, this one seemed like it could work. The problems are that most of the jokes aren't funny, the script is undercooked, the direction is amateurish, and none of the characters are likable. Let's go through this scientifically:

The jokes: to be perfectly fair, some connect and some don't. I laughed a few times, and the opening scene - a flashback of Mr. Woodcock's gym class - was a very promising start, with pitch-perfect line readings from Thornton. After that, all of the funny lines were in the preview. Usually people say that as an exagerration, but it matched up almost perfectly here: if I laughed, it was in the preview, and if I didn't, it wasn't. Suffice to say, if you don't think the preview is funny, stay far, far away.

The script: it's less than 90 minutes, first of all. That's fine for me because it meant I got out of there as quickly as possible, but the people who pay money for this may feel robbed at a jarringly abrupt ending and subplots that do nothing and go nowhere. There's a love interest for Scott's character who appears in all of two scenes, unless you count a post-credits gag in which she stands in the background without saying anything. Her storyline is never resolved. The main throughline of the movie, meanwhile, follows the predictable pattern of Scott's character getting increasingly flustered with Woodcock and leaping to conclusions ("He's cheating on my mom because I saw him with a young blond woman!") that have reversals a blind infant could spot from five miles away.

The direction: passable, but every once in a while there's a random instance that makes you realize you're dealing with a first-timer. In a restaurant scene, a waiter approaches the table and is framed in such a way that you think a joke is being set up, but then he disappears, never to be seen again. There are also some bizarre inconsistencies, like when Woodcock slams face-first into a street while harnessed to a stretcher. He's revealed not only as conscious, but completely unscathed. If you don't want to be unnecessarily gory, that's fine, but ...