Waiting… Review
by samseescinema (sammeriam AT comcast DOT net)October 10th, 2005
Waiting...
reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com
rating: 3 out of 4
Director: Robert McKittrick
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Justin Long, Chi McBride, Anna Faris, Dane Cook Screenplay: Robert McKittrick
MPAA Classification: R (strong and crude sexual humor, pervasive language and some drug use)
2005 has, as of yet, been dubbed as the year for comedy's comeback. With two hugely popular comedies (Wedding Crashers and 40 Year Old Virgin) pooling tickets sales much past the $100 million mark at the box office, Lions Gate Productions' new entry, Waiting, couldn't have hoped for a better crowd for their film to leap into. Thankfully, Waiting continues 2005's tradition of quality comedy. It's certainly not as good as the other broad comedies lauded this year, but its low, low, low brow humor and consistently funny gross-out gags are sure to satisfy the same audiences that loved the Crashers and the Virgin.
The film takes place over the course of one day, following the lives of the waiters, cooks, and manager of the family restaurant chain Shenanigans (in a nice nod to Sooper Troopers). Heading up the cast is Justin Long playing Dean, whose day's taken a nosedive since his mother mentioned, once again, the success stories of his former high school classmates. Dean's story actually plays as Waiting's backbone story, focusing on his dismay at the prospect of becoming assistant manager at Shenanigans and wasting his life away waiting tables. But, really, most of Waiting's laughs lie in the crazy antics of the rest of the cast. First time director/writer Robert McKittrick, wrote the screenplay to work as a kind of oddball ensemble film, where we flit about the restaurant's many characters and their insane issues.
Connecting most of the characters, however, is the game they all love to play, quaintly titled "The Penis Showing Game." And, yes, the game plays exactly like it sounds. We learn the game and its many strategies through Monty's tour of Shenanigans as he trains, Mitch (John Daley), the new guy. It's especially popular among the cooks (fans of stand-up will notice Dane Cook playing Floyd, one of the cook's), who suggest to Mitch that, in his free time at the restaurant, he should play with himself and come up with new ways to win the aptly-titled game. Admittedly, this sort of humor is why Waiting never rises to the level of 40 Year Old Virgin. It's funny in its persistent repetition and comedic timing, but, at the same time, so low-brow that it loses taste and quickly becomes immature.
Director McKittrick succeeds in that he smartly captures the bizarre camaraderie between co-workers at temporary jobs. Having worked for nearly a year in a similarly depressing job as the characters in Waiting (I'm a lowly part-time cashier at Target), I, and surely many other teenagers, can relate to the oddball relationships of these waiters. The film seems to have been written from first-hand experience; as if McKittrick quit his job, went to film school, and wrote Waiting. These characters actually function more as caricatures, but the basis for every one of them comes from the real-life workplace.
The final scene is set at a party, and as the last line is read and the credit for Unit Production Manager is superimposed, every member of the audience sit comfortably in their seat, content to watching the characters party. That's when you know the film works: when we wouldn't mind sticking around for a couple hours more, hanging out with the people on screen. And although Waiting may pull some unnecessary jokes and cross the line into boring immaturity at times, it has enough bizarre truths and likeable characters to make it worth of a Saturday evening at the multiplex.
-www.samseescinema.com
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
