No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 9: The one that's absolutely depressing

 

 

Title: Absolutely Anything

What Year?: 2015 (UK release)/ 2017 (US release)

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

As I write this, I’m closing on another milestone for my reviews, and 10 for the countdown for this feature. In the process, I’ve looked into a few movies of interest, in a good or bad way. The result was that a few movies got set aside, for the moment, while a few others rose higher, in part based simply on what I could get hold of. That left one in particular that had already been very high for this feature, despite the fact that it kept slipping out of my mind when I tried listing movies to cover, and as always, my memory getting hazy is a very, very bad sign. With that background for context, I present Absolutely Anything, and truly, it will make you want to watch absolutely anything else.

Our story begins with the launch of Voyager, which is enough for a flashback to “Trek 1”, and an introduction to a group of aliens who have taken it on themselves to judge which sentient species are fit to survive. We then meet Neil, an everyman who works as a teacher while fancying to be a writer, seemingly devoid both of redeeming qualities and the ambition to be evil. The aliens decide to give our antihero virtually godlike powers, which in turn becomes a framework for a series of hijinks and sight gags including an alien attack on his school and a general zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, a romance begins to unfold with a pretty journalist who inexplicably lives in the same building, complicated by the influence of his powers and a stalker with military training. He gets some grounded advice when he gives his dog sentience. His final trial will be whether to keep his powers- not knowing that the aliens are prepared to destroy Earth!

Absolutely Anything was a 2015 science fantasy/ comedy film directed by Terry Jones, known for comedies including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, from a script cowritten with Gavin Scott. The story was acknowledged to be based on the H.G. Wells story “The Man Who Could Work Miracles”; by Jones’ further accounts, a version of the script had been shown to Douglas Adams, who died in 2001. The film starred Simon Pegg as Neil and Kate Beckinsale as his romantic interest Catherine, with real-life military veteran Rob Riggle as Col. Grant Kotchev. Robin Williams was cast as the voice of Neil’s dog Dennis, in his final film role. Additional voice acting was provided by John Cleese and other Monty Python veterans as the aliens. The film was in production beginning in 2010, with live filming being completed by May 2014. The film was not released until August 2015 in the UK and 2017 in the US. It received mixed to poor reviews and a box office as low as $6.3 million. Jones retired after receiving a diagnosis of dementia around the time of the film’s release. He died of the same condition in 2020.

For my experiences, my real frame of reference for this film is the most complicated of my personal classifications, the Anachronistic Outlier. By my own admission, I have been back and forth about what films really deserve this designation, and there have been times when I used it for entries I no longer consider that unusual for the time. On the other hand, I have had significant successes, films that felt just a little out of place to me that had indeed been prolonged and delayed in ways I had absolutely no knowledge of until I dug deeper (see The Brain That Wouldn’t Die). The present film is in many ways the most egregious example of all. It was obvious that it had taken a while for it to make its way over here, which can in itself make the difference between timely and self-dated in a genre as topical as comedy. Yet, there were still things about it that still seemed more fitting for ca. 2002 than 2012, and I felt absolutely no surprise when I found proof that it was knocking around even earlier than that.

Moving forward, the central reality of this movie is that it is just random. This is an approach which certainly can work, especially in the under-90 minutes running time of this film. Here, however, the law of averages is not in anybody’s favor. The “good” gags trend toward mildly amusing, if usually predictable, like the accidental general resurrection. For the rest, the best that can be said is that few if any are actually confusing, while the unkindest assessment is that they are unnecessarily crude without achieving actual shock value. On the latter vein, this anticipates the bad example of The Happytime Murders as an R-rated movie that doesn’t go far enough to “earn” it. It has to be added, the dialogue supplied by the Python crew doesn’t contribute one bit either way One more thing, when Neil/ Pegg refers to his classroom as “10C”, the accent is so wonky I swear I repeatedly heard it as “Tennessee”. The real reason I bring it up here is that, if my confusion had actually been part of the plot, the resulting gags could have been far more amusing than what we see onscreen.

On the usual “pro” side, the only thing that stopped me from giving this film the lowest rating is that things do pick up by the second half. The most obvious reason is Williams as Dennis, yet not nearly as much as might be expected; his role is quite limited on paper, without his first line until past the halfway mark. In fact, the more philosophical arc starts as the romance between Neil and Catherine heats up, without him knowing how little his powers are at work. I will further admit that the “cringe” factor isn’t nearly as bad as I might have said from memory; among other things, Neil wishes for the lady to be “in love” with him, not for that to lead to anything outside her presumably normal behavior. We get further contrast from Grant/ Riggle, who gleefully drives his character off the rails with villainy Neil would clearly never dream of. Then we do get an emotional resolution from the dog, who proves himself as the one person (???) who can give up the power. In the meantime, there’s at least two sophisticated satirical bits in Dennis’s revelation about belly rubs and the darkly comical consequences when Neil wishes away “reasons” for war.

That puts me at the “one scene”, and there’s one more intriguing by far than any other. At about the 45-minute mark, Neil is moving around books and objects with a sort of telekinetic levitation that doesn’t really fit what we know about his powers unless it’s something he gave himself. In the midst of it, Dennis starts parking, while he monologues about Catherine. For a while, it seems as if he understands the dog, or thinks he does, until he finally complains he can’t understand Dennis. Of course, he promptly gives the dog the ability to talk, then to reason, which only gets a continuous plea for a treat. He finally gives the dog a treat, then muses that he thought he has made Dennis a reasoning creature. The pet promptly counters, “Reasoning creatures still have desires,” which he promptly connects with Neil’s dilemma. There’s an extra twist as the dog refers to the woman with what is after all the proper term for females of his own kind, drawing further argument from Dennis until Catherine rings the bell. What’s impressive is that this all fits within maybe 3 minutes. For all the complaining I would usually do, this is genuinely representative of the film’s better moments… but they are still not nearly enough.

In closing, I come back both to the rating and the classification. As already noted, this is another movie I have gone easy on just by not giving the lowest rating. The better parts of the film were already enough to talk me out of that. Having uncovered its full history, what I was left with was a sense of true tragedy, for Jones even more than Williams. (There’s a lot more there, both heroic and depressing, that I haven’t touched.) It would be easy to be beguiled by the tantalizing “what ifs”, a film either made when the script was timely and the director was still of unquestionably sound mind, or put in the hands of someone who could update it appropriately. It might have been great. Then again, it might have merely been forgettable. However you look at it, it’s an exceptionally sad end to several great careers. That, for me, is enough to call it a day and look for a happier tale to tell.