Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie
3 Stars(R)
There’s a strain of direct-to-video screwball, hard-R shenanigans that, contrary to all conventional expectations, push the boundaries of taste to vulgar excesses in their quest for bored and juvenile viewers. The problem, at least for me, has always been that even these T&A-heavy, barely pieced-together offerings fail to push far enough, so bound by the urge to apply even the loosest cohesion that it’s like trying to make bread out of snowflakes.
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the surrealist creators of Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, have no such issues. They specialize in sketchy snowflakes and are refreshingly uninterested in cohesion. While that makes for television that I didn’t watch as long as I had the choice of literally anything else, their brand of scatological nonsense may have found its most favorable home on the big screen.
They star as the failed directors of a movie (with a $1 billion budget) called Bonjour Diamond Dan, a knockoff of The Tourist starring a Johnny Depp look-alike, which, due to extreme production excesses, only has three usable minutes. Now held over the fire by the film’s producers, the pair escapes to S’wallow Valley, where they hope to make up the billion or so by running a strip mall. Hilarity – and a bathtub of diarrhea – ensues.
Tim and Eric are at their most irreverent when lampooning the very idea of their own movie, as in the endless opening vanity cards for the fictional Schlaaang Corp. or the obligatory climactic shootout; they’re less effective when pushing the bathroom humor to new levels of ridiculousness – who hasn’t seen that?
Featuring a pretty stunning cast of guest stunts, from Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to Jeff Goldblum (as Chef Goldblum), Will Forte and Zach Galifianakis, Billion Dollar Movie is wildly uneven, astoundingly puerile and pretty goddamned funny.
