Waiting… is supposed to be a movie about the restaurant industry, and the poor schleps stuck working in it. Having spent more than my fair share of time working in eateries, let me assure you that there’s unmined comedic gold lurking in there. Waiting doesn’t find it. Instead of creating the restaurant industry version of Office Space, they go for easy jokes meant more to offend than garner laughs. Well at least in that they succeeded. Unless you’re a hardcore pedophile, they will definitely offend.
Justin Long stars in the movie as Dean, a kid with no future, wasting his life away waiting tables at the local equivalent of an Applebee’s. We follow him and his table-waiting buddies through a day on the job, as they serve tables and show each other their dicks. The displaying of the male penis figures prominently in this film, in fact it’s really more central to the story than the restaurant. The penis-showing game is everything, and at one point one of the cooks describes it as the entire secret to the restaurant’s success. I think this is supposed to be funny, but unless you’re a sheep-screwing hillbilly with the mental capacity of the retarded guy from Sling Blade, it isn’t. Twenty-minutes and thirty penis showing jokes into the movie I was rooting for a good sexual harassment lawsuit to come along and shut the whole crappy thing down. Is it possible for a movie audience to be sexually harassed? If so, I think seeing Luis Guzman’s ballsack qualifies as that.
Dean’s best buddy is Monty, played by the usually charming and often raunchy Ryan Reynolds. But even Reynolds’ normally sparkling, sarcastic wit can’t save this movie, in fact I think he made it worse. You see, Monty loves screwing underage girls, and his friends seem to think that his predilection towards statutory rape is pretty cool. The effect is that not only is Reynolds not funny, he's really really creepy. Writer/director Rob McKittrick also thinks less-than-legal screwing is rather funny, and the jokes not crafted around the displaying of genitalia are all devoted exclusively to the pursuit of jailbait. In fact, screwing kids is so awesome that by the end of the movie Monty has recruited some of his friends to it, including their restaurant manager who does his level best to take home their under-age hostess. Tough luck for him, Monty saw her training bra first.
Waiting is a vile, small, miserable little excuse for a comedy. It’s despicable, and not in the good way that the Farrelly brothers’ morally reprehensible movies used to be. There’s nothing here but dick jokes and the glorification of statutory rape. They’ve got a great cast, all of whom I now think less of for agreeing to read the big piles of word-vomit written in McKittrick’s script. Ok, maybe bottom-feeders like Justin Long and Anna Ferris don’t have all that many options, but for Luis Guzman and Ryan Reynolds there’s no excuse. What are you doing in this unfunny wad of shit? Don’t expect any tips.
