3 gibbles out of 5

Director: David Wain

On the road to comedy, there are ups and downs.  If it’s in the pursuit of the eventual ‘big laugh,’ I’ll let it pass.  ‘The Ten’ is uneven in a new way, drumming up a formula that could’ve been a non-stop laugh fest but ends up a muddle, one of those movies for which I’m sure repeated viewings will expose the hidden hilariousness.

So Paul Rudd stands in front of some computer-generated ten commandment tablets and tells us he’s going to show us ten stories.  And so we go one by one down the list and, yes, we get a short story loosely based on each commandment.  They are all funny – conceptually, at least.  Some of them do elicit great laughs in the pure State formula of an explosion of weirdness, but the film is punctuated by enough quiet “is this a joke?” beats that half the run-time you might be worried that you’re not watching a comedy.

But: Yes, allowing that I’m bias toward Wain and his crew, I still give The Ten credit for trying.  It tries 100% of the time and succeeds well for 50% of it, with enough credibility to the other 50% that I’d watch it again out of curiosity.  This tops easy comedies which go for simple laughs most of the time but are mostly forgettable or fall apart on further views, and it far surpasses genre comedies – gross out humor, for example – that, hey, you laugh at but when someone tells you they think that movie’s funny you roll your eyes.

I still haven’t said much positive, have I?

If you’re familiar with Wet Hot American Summer, you understand the slow burn approach.  ‘Summer’ starts out normal with some hokey jokes and spikes of hilarity that breaks out into all out weird insanity about 2/3rds of the way through.  ‘The Ten,’ being sort of ten short pieces, feels like the same method but chopped up out of order.  While this might seem more traditional, with laughs coming and going during the movie, it’s too weird to play out that way.  Plus the fact that everything seems really funny.  The creative minds behind the film are funny people, and they wrote a funny film.  I can imagine the writing sessions were full of laughter.

But on the road to that ultimate joke, sometimes your delivery is off.  I’ve seen this before – PCU, Airheads.  You can tell the film is funny, but you’re not laughing.  After repeated viewings, I’d finally get the joke and claim those movies as hilarious.  But I almost hated them at first.  The Ten has some steps ahead of that crew by actually being, initially, funny.  I look forward to adding more gibbles after I’ve watched it a million more times.

It's probably funny...

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