Absolutely Anything

I’ve spoken about how hard it is to make good comedy movies. It’s mainly because humour comes down to us knowing the characters and it takes very skilled writers, director and actors to get us to know the characters, send them on a quest of some sort and have a satisfying conclusion in a 2-hour film. TV shows have a massive advantage in that they have entire seasons for us to get to know the characters and as soon as know them, they can simply set up obstacles for them before they eventually get cancelled. The challenge for Absolutely Anything is not just to set up those good characters, but also give us a fairly novel concept.

Neil (Simon Pegg, Shaun of the Dead) is a down on his luck teacher with a crush on his neighbour. However he gets a massive surprise when unbeknownst to him, a group of aliens decide to give him the power to do and wish for anything. However if he doesn’t use these powers for good, the aliens are going to destroy planet Earth as it will prove the human race is not good for anything.

Now before I go on, there is one unintended sad point of this film. This is the final screen credit for Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting) who is the voice of Dennis the dog after Neil wishes to be able to understand him. Unfortunately, this is the sort of Robin Williams role that many mocked him for before his untimely death. He gives it his all and tries to be funny, but either his improvisations or the script, with Williams you can never tell, just doesn’t work here. It never seems like it’s the dog is actually talking, if Babe can do it, this film can do it, and there’s just a big disconnect between the dog and the rest of the movie. It’s a huge shame that it is with this voice performance that we must say goodbye to Williams, but I do appreciate the film makers putting in some video of him doing his performance in the credits as an acknowledgement of it’s place in the Williams timeline.

Now for Simon Pegg, this should be a role he’s able to do in his sleep because he’s done it a million times before. Lovable loser that strives for more? Yeah, his career was pretty much made on that back when Shaun of the Dead was released. So it’s a shame that he fails to bring anything new to this sort of role in this film. It doesn’t just mean the character is predictable, but the jokes are too. It’s not at all surprising when Neil wishes for a big penis, and the fact it’s so large he can’t support its weight fails to bring a laugh too.

That is the biggest failure of the film, it fails to be funny at any turn. This should be prime comedic material but the only joke this film has is that wishes are sometimes taken out of context with weird results. And I hate to sound like South Park but, The Simpsons did it. Yeah, they did a short special on this back in the 1990s, and it lasted as long as you can really last a concept like this on the basis of you need to be careful of what you wish for. This film tries to extend that concept to an hour and a half, and it feels stretched and padded to make it do that.

The biggest disappointment is that this film reunited the Pythons and fails to do anything funny with them. The five still living pythons play the alien committee that are deciding if Neil is being good enough to save the humans and most of their dialogue is bickering, which is just not funny even if it is the Pythons that are doing it. To make it even worse the aliens they are playing are put together with the spare CGI that was too cheap to use in washing up liquid adverts, meaning you can’t even enjoy the visuals.

So, is there anything to gained from this film? Well, the jokes aren’t painful, meaning that you aren’t constantly cringing throughout the film like some others I can mention, hello Mortdecai, and everyone is trying their best to make this film better. Kate Beckinsale (Underworld) makes her role more than the typical love interest and Sanjeev Bhaskar’s (Notting Hill) reactions to basically being worshipped is the closest I ever came to breaking a smirk.

I think it is possible for a good comedy film to be made about someone with infinite power, it’s just Absolutely Anything isn’t that film. It’s a film that demands the least from everyone, the script writers, the actors and the director, and even when some of them try do more it doesn’t work, because it’s like trying to make a cordon bleu meal with the Spam and corned beef you got from Aldi. It isn’t possible, even for the most talented in the industry, to make this more than a very dull comedy.

Best Moment: It was a very nice and not overly sentimental touch to put a short video of Robin Williams voicing his part in this film in the credits.

Worst Moment: As the aliens look lik a dog’s breakfast vomited up, let’s give this to every scene they are in.

1/5