The Darwin Awards

The Darwin Awards premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival with all the bells and whistles and fanfare one would expect from a celebrity-ridden 20th Century Fox Production. Then the movie started. The jig, and the film's buzz, endemically evaporated shortly after the opening credits. The film stars Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love)-miscasting on par with Pamela Anderson playing an animated voice on the show Striperella-as a blood-phobic Homicide detective-cum-insurance-consultant. Fienne's deliver is so droll and lifeless they must have accidentally hit the "erase personality" button when the post-production people were sandblasting off his British accent. I suppose he wanted a free trip to Park City badly enough to humiliate himself.

Does the movie sound stupid yet? There's more. Winona Ryder, as an insurance claims adjustor/investigator, negotiates her role without utilizing common actor's tools like charisma, sass, or sex appeal. Together she and Fiennes tediously wander the country studying deaths nominated for Darwin Awards-an accolade bestowed on morons who die of completely avoidable and therefore dumb causes. But how can a movie about stupid people be stupid? Pretty easily according to Darwin.

Everyone in the film, save for Tim Blake Nelson, should be tasered for cashing their paychecks. The camerawork has the aesthetic equivalent of monkeys throwing their own feces; Wilmer Valderrama's camera-toting documentarian character's P.O.V shots perpetrate the most flagrant contrivance in the entire film-the camera stock remains the same while two celluloid strips bookend the frame. Vile.

Sometimes watching crappy, cheese-ball movies can be fun, especially if you feel like being a smart-ass, but The Darwin Awards takes itself so seriously that enjoying it can be oppressively stultifying. The film's plot and the big-name actors involved may have looked good on paper, but unfortunately paper isn't celluloid. In the words of Caddyshack's Judge Smell's, this movie "stands for badness." The worst badness. The kind that makes you wonder whether your time and money would be better spent at the zoo watching the monkeys: they may be smarter than the people who made this film. Doesn't that deserve some kind of award?

Special Features include The Making of the Darwin Awards and remorseless Cast & Crew Interviews. In no way do the special features redeem the film; if anything the two are conspiratorial.