Hollow Idle

If you know me at all, you know that I rarely go for "dumb movies." The occasional exception does come along -- a Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or some such -- that 1) I somehow decide to see; and that 2) I actually find at least somewhat funny. I can offer no better reason than "you can't get to point 2 without first allowing point 1" as explanation for why I recently decided to watch Idle Hands.

This is a now decade old(!) comedy about a slacker druggie teen whose hand becomes possessed by an evil force that makes him kill everyone around him. It stars Devon Sawa (if you recognize him at all, it would have to be from this, or Final Destination) in the main role, and features an it's-a-shame-nobody-will-put-him-in-better-films Seth Green, a before-anyone-knew-who-she-was Jessica Alba, a brilliant-even-in-crap Fred Willard, and an I-can't-believe-she's-slumming-it-here Vivica A. Fox.

The movie isn't a disaster. It does yield some decent laughs here and there. But that's about all it's good for; the story is (predictably) deficient. Even when a movie goes completely for laughs, I expect a certain basic level of sensical storytelling until you cross the line into Zucker Brothers, Airplane! or The Naked Gun type territory. This movie doesn't ever go quite that far, and so I couldn't quite buy off on some of the ridiculous things that happen in the course of the film.

When the main character kills his two buddies, they just come back as undead things (I hesitate to use the word "zombies," as their personalities remain intact) to keep cracking jokes until the final reel. How this happens to them and not anyone else killed in the course of the film is truly bizarre. Rather than try to explain it in relation to the supernatural cursing of the main character's hand, we're simply told that these two stoners were too lazy to "go toward the light."

And don't even get me started on the final act, which has our hero chasing his own severed hand all over town.

I don't want to give the impression I was expecting a narrative masterpiece here, but I had thought my expectations sufficiently lowered, and the film still slid under them. Yes, there were laughs, but there are better films you can watch just for cheap laughs (like those Zucker films I mentioned). I give Idle Hands a C-.