Bad things; good movie
Author: gus120970 from London, UK
17 May 2004
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
VBT, at it's very least is a polarising movie: the views expressed on IMDB tend to be love it/hate it rather than lukewarm, so it should be credited for animating its audience in that way.
Now, in my view, the haters would probably have been comfortable renting something like 'Independence Day' for sentiment and performances, or 'My Big Fat Greek Crowdpleasing Wedding' if they want an occasional satirical but ultimately life-affirming comedy about love and marriage.VBT is neither. It's pretty much unpleasant from beginning to end, from prostitution to fratricide, and not in the least life-affirming. Everyone, from the psychopathic realtor played by Slater, to the morally vacuous and weak-willed groom-to-be is grotesque. However, I venture to add: it IS funny, and it IS clever.
Not merely, as Americans like to say, 'gross out' funny, but morally satirical. One of the darkest moments of the film is where the practising Jew character, the most morally developed of all in the movie has an attack of conscience as the group are preparing to dispose of the bodies of a prostitute and a security guard out in the desert.He says they must observe the Jewish practice that requires the bodies to be interred as complete, which provies impossible as both have been hacked up, wrapped up in plastic and distributed amongst four suitcases. What follows is a gruesome jigsaw puzzle of body parts, culminating a great sight gag of them lying out neatly arranged.
There is a more serious premise behind the story of how five apparently ordinary guys who start out on a bachelor weekend are drawn progressively into more and more despicable acts. One of the great moral questions, from the time of the Greek moral philosophers to our own experience of the holocaust is how men come to do evil.Are there just some evil men, waiting for their potential to be awakened, or is there the potential in all of us, if we are given the excuse and the opportunity? Or is all that is required for evil, as the axiom states, that good men do nothing? Certainly, in the early part of the movie when the first death is down to an accident resulting from a series of misdemeanours, the more moral and sympathetic members of the groups are crucially transfixed by the possible damage to themselves from coming clean at that point.
It's at that point that Slater's character, the charming, functioning psychopath (he does them so well) is able to seize the initiative, provide what appears to be a practical and just about morally palatable solution to their problem and a path back to normality.This is the true moral junction of the film; everything beyond that is a satirical commentary on their inability to do the one good thing required of them - come clean at the outset. Trying to read the film as totally naturalistic beyond that point doesn't work - it becomes increasingly absurd and unpredictable for comic purposes.
This is a very wordy movie. The script is subtle and complex, and a large part of that is given over to Slater and his persuasive speeches on why a particular course of action should be taken at a particular time.In the beginning, he exhorts the group that they should cover up the prostitute's death and provides practical arguments to support this, seizing on the upcoming wedding as a moral defence for the actions they are going to commit. The movie's absurdity lies in the ever more extreme and disproportionate acts the group are prepared to commit simply for a wedding to take place.
But there is a serious point underlying this. One common facet of 'organised evil' by apparently normal, moral individuals is the belief that unpleasant acts are necessary for a greater good. This becomes a device to obscure the badness of the bad things because the intent remains good. Should we judge acts by themselves or their intent?The film suggests, in contemporary society, we've descended even lower. We are obsessed by the appearance of morality rather than the actual practice of it. A society obsessed by symbols, ceremony and rituals rather than the truths they are supposed to represent. And Cameron Diaz is a wonderful exemplar of that ideal as the ruthless bride who steals the last 10 minutes of the movie.
