Best Man Down: An Abysmal Failure of the Highest Degree

The best thing about director Ted Koland’s Best Man Down is that it’s short. That may sound like hyperbole, but I had a hard time finding one good thing to say about this movie. Even at a mere hour-and-twenty-nine minutes long, I was begging for it to be over so I could move on to something with a semblance of interest in its own story, or at least enough of it to succeed on some meager level. It is a drama without intimacy, a story without purpose, and worst of all, a comedy without the laughs. Plenty of people have taken a crack at the dramedy subgenre over the years. Best Man Down doesn’t even puncture the surface. As a personal insult to top everything else off, it even features the worst driving scene I’ve seen in years, one long shot where it’s painfully obvious that the car our characters are stuck in was digitally inserted onto a road they’ll probably never see in person.

Scott and Kristin, two horribly dull Minnesotans daring to share the state with Fargo, are getting married to each other because everyone else thought they were boring. While they’re staying at a luxury hotel in Arizona, their poorly behaved best man, Lumpy, decides to be one little monkey jumping on the bed. If you know the rest of the nursery rhyme, you'll know he falls off and bumps his head, but unlike the relatively fortunate monkeys in the story, Lumpy just dies. For the most part, the rest of the movie consists of Scott and Kristin traveling around Minnesota to inform people of his passing, and if this sounds dull, it is. This movie is so much ado about nothing, which I hate to say, given that a funeral is a major plot point. It presents a premise and doesn't justify it with substance. Let me state it clearly: this is the worst movie I’ve seen in almost two years.

I get that comedy is subjective, but Best Man Down commits the capital offense of simply not being funny. Allow me to explain. This movie does not understand how to set up a joke. It does not understand the patience that goes into telling one. It just drops one-liners and visual gags, prioritizing forcefulness over thoughtfulness again and again like an overcaffeinated twelve-year-old boy hoping you’ll eventually laugh at him. There’s a mean-spiritedness to so many of these jokes that left a really bad taste in my mouth, a nastiness that ranges from unfunny all the way up to borderline macabre.

I almost wonder if the movie eventually wises up to the fact that its comedy isn’t working, because it turns into a slower, more somber story over time, somewhat more tonally appropriate to the concept of Scott’s best man biting the dust. However, the best thing I can say about the emerging drama of Best Man Down is that it’s not as scathingly bad as its jokes. I was given no space to know either the bride or the groom; instead, I was thrown headlong with them into situation after situation, conflicts that completely ignore both them and the things that happened to them before. You don’t get to know any part of their inner lives, though the movie weirdly insists on exploring the day-to-day stories of characters with the loosest possible connections to our unhappy couple. I get that every character is technically relevant to Scott, Kristin, or mostly Lumpy, but this movie could have refined its focus by cutting them entirely. Instead, we’re left with an imprecise drama that fails to be supported by unfunny comedy.

Best Man Down balances two subplots between two different groups of characters with the barest of connections, connections that aren’t even made clear until almost halfway through the movie. It’s almost like it combined two different stories for the sake of having enough material to justify making it. It doesn’t even have good taste in music. The needle drops are distracting and jarringly out of place, sort of like the director just inserted songs he liked into the movie without asking himself what purpose they served. Best Man Down doesn’t even have the courtesy of sounding good. From its missing purpose to the awful soundtrack failing to clarify it, I hate this movie with every fiber of my being. It is disjointed and unfunny, a slideshow of awkward human drama that a robot could have written.

Everything this movie touches turns to sludge, and it is a clown parade of tropes from other comedies, stolen and trampled without so much as a thought for why they worked in those movies. I am not just saying that this is one you can avoid: I am actively asking you to stay away from Best Man Down. This offensive excuse for comedy is acidically forceful, never pausing to consider that the best jokes flow naturally. It experiments with a lot of different tones and sets the lab on fire with them all. Some dramedies succeed as both a drama and a comedy. This one succeeds at neither.

Best Man Down – 1/10

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10