If you have the short attention span of the average millennial, here’s a three-word review: Shit: The Movie.
If you have more patience: Smosh: The Movie is an extension of Smosh, the YouTube channel of comedy duo Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. My 10-year-old son tells me — and the Internet confirms — that the two’s videos are among the site’s most popular. I haven’t seen any of their clips, so I can judge the Smosh brand only by this maiden feature. And in doing so, I can say three things with certainty:
1. I fail to see the appeal.
2. The bar on YouTube fame is set periously low.
3. I weep for the future of comedy.
Assumedly playing themselves since they’ve retained their real names, Ian and Anthony are roomies in Ian’s parents’ home. Ian’s a total slacker; Anthony at least has a job, albeit delivering piping-hot pizza pies. With their five-year high school reunion looming, Anthony hopes to reconnect with his unrequited crush, Anna (Jillian Nelson, 1313 Giant Killer Bees!), but he wishes he could remove a embarrassing senior-year video of him that someone posted to YouTube.
Toward that most noble of pursuits, they appeal to YouTube prez Steve YouTube (Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Ian Black, exerting more craft than the material requires), who sends them into the Internet — literally, via magic portal — to retrieve the offending file. This setup is all a silly, disposable comedy should need in order to take off running, poking fun at and deflating dozens of the web’s most infamous viral videos. It all but places the ball at the one-yard line on first down. A wealth of targets awaits the skewering … and stays that way, because the potential for Smosh: The Movie is roundly, soundly squandered.
Actor-turned-director Alex Winter (Freaked) is at a disadvantage from frame one, because the script by Steve Marmel and Eric Falconer (respective TV producers of Family Guy and Blue Mountain State) demonstrates an unwillingness to exercise imagination. Instead, the duo opts for least-common-denominator humor, with much of it depending on Ian’s recurring lust for the well-kneaded rear of Butt Massage Girl (Brittany Ross, TV’s The Middle) in his favorite vid, as well as your familiarity with the Smosh boys’ fellow YouTube celebrities (like Grace Helbig) who make cameo appearances. Let’s not even get into the atrocious opening animation, other to say it looks to have been the losing entry in a crowdsourced contest.
I only laughed once during Smosh: The Movie, and it arrived at the movie’s last line. I’m still amazed I was able to last that long. —Rod Lott