Review of Sol Goode

Sol Goode (2003)
1/10
Sol Really Bad
28 June 2007
If you've ever been stumped at a cocktail party when someone asks you, "what's the worst movie you've ever seen", you may want to rent this movie so as to have an instantaneous reply. I mean, there's bad, then there's REALLY bad. This film falls into the latter category.

What's amazing is not that they got a budget for this film, but that they actually got some name actors for it. I can't imagine any working actor looking at this puerile script and thinking to themselves, "yes, this is one I must do."

The script itself is dreadful. Overwhelmingly bad. If one didn't read the credits, you'd think it was written by an undersexed (or possibly oversexed) 8th-grader. It's the kind of script that drunken frat boys might come up with if they were really bored, and had a half hour to spare. If you took out the fart jokes, the penis jokes, and the irritable bowel jokes, there would really only be about 10 minutes of film, and those 10 minutes would be stuffed with every comic cliché you could imagine.

The film offers no real laughs, predictability to the extreme, and, surprisingly, no nudity. Which is odd, since it's like watching a slasher film with no blood. The only reason I can imagine a film like Showgirls (which is "Gone With the Wind" compared to Sol Goode) got financed was because they promised the backers that Elizabeth Hurley would be naked and gyrating throughout half the film. This film doesn't even have the common decency to try and titillate the audience after forcing us through the 100 minutes of torture.

The performances are mostly quite good. The actors do a great job at elevating the material, especially Katharine Towne, in a thankless and underwritten role. Cheri Oteri, Natasha Wagner, and Jamie Kennedy all put their best foot forward trying to turn very little into something. Cheri Oteri plays a sadistic, high-powered agent, which is actually the best writing in the film. Unfortunately, it's a subplot that really has no connection to the main storyline. It may have been a better film had they simply stayed in the agency and made it all about Jamie Kennedy's character, since the least interesting character in the whole film is the title character. You can't quite imagine how so many people seem to know and admire a guy who has never had a job, isn't getting work as an actor, dates homely women, and doesn't even seem particularly funny or charming.

The film goes nowhere, and takes forever to get there. But I will give this writer/director his due. It takes quite of bit of pluck and determination to get a film this bad made. He surely deserves "hustler of the year" award. If he could sell this film to execs, he could sell ice to Eskimos.
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