A Year of Bad Movies # 21 — “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2009)
IMDB Score: 4.8 out of 10
Metacritic Score: 29 out of 100
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 24 out of 100
Tucker Max is not a good person.
"I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" answers the question: "What would 'The Hangover' be like if it was cast with unlikable asses?"
Or at least that’s what the Internet blogger turned celebrity/date rapist wants you to think — why else would he glorify his lifestyle as a womanizing, misogynistic, drunken adolescent on his internet site, in his best-selling book and now in a autobiographical movie?
Well … audiences can only assume it’s autobiographical because that’s what Tucker Max tells us. In reality, my James Frey-sense is tingling — telling me Tucker Max is actuality a million little pieces of bullcorn.
That, though, is not important when watching “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” the surprisingly theatrical motion picture adaptation of Tucker Max’s printed account of a bachelor party gone wrong that he was once a part of.
I say surprisingly because “Beer in Hell” has all the markings of a straight-to-DVD dump. Low production quality, questionable acting and a truly unfortunate script mar the biggest vanity project since “Antwone Fisher.” The difference between Tucker Max’s cinematic self-fellatio and “Antwone Fisher,” though, can be summed up in one word: Quality.
In the movie, Matt Czuchry plays Tucker Max, reenacting the purported shenanigans Max indulged in during his heyday as a grad student party animal.
The movie follows Max and his friends as they cut loose with an excess of alcohol, hateful insults and sexual escapades with disabled citizens.
Coming clean, at one time I would have considered myself a fan of Tucker Max. Discovering his book (also titled “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”) during my late adolescence, I was enamored by the ribald tales of Tucker Max, an alpha male who represented everything I thought I should be as a college male — a booze-guzzling, bromantic, philandering smart ass with enough charm to make being a douche attractive.
His book’s stories were wildly elaborate yarns in which Max would jump back and forth between being a complete and utter asshole and having wild, passionate sex with any woman he so desired.
And then I grew up. I realized that I had absolutely no desire to be the kind of unrepentant jackass that Tucker Max prided himself as.
That being said, I fully realize that I am no longer Tucker Max’s target audience. While I could appreciate some of the wit behind a few jokes in the script (of which Max co-wrote), I swallowed up any potential laughs that may have emerged with grit teeth and flared nostrils.
While a few jokes were kind of funny, the script was mostly a mess of mixed tones. It tried to be deep and sentimental in places but was weighed down by its inability to say anything new or deliver fully-fleshed characters (ironic due to the fact that the film’s characters are supposedly based on real people in real situations).
Other members of the four-person audience I watched the movie with seemed to enjoy the movie enough. As they sipped the cans of beer they had smuggled into the movie, these trucker-hat wearing, popped collar sporting fratmen snorted, guffawed and belly-laughed their way through each and every banal unrepentant politically incorrect comedy misfire the same way they probably get a kick out of their weekly Klan rallies.
Don’t think me a prude. I can appreciate controversial, in-your-face humor as much as the next guy my age. In fact, I love edgy comics that push the boundaries of taste with their humor. The difference between Max and these other comics, though, is that Max seems to be laughing with the under-educated hate-spewing hoard then at them.
Eventually, I had to face the fact that Tucker Max is no longer a guy I can enjoy.
As a man who has built a career out of glorifying his own self-image at the expense of others, he has become exactly the type of person I loathe most in this world.
I had hoped that watching “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” a condensed adaption of some of his funnier stories would help me regain that adolescent respect for the man — even for a little bit — but, if anything, it just reinforced my disdain for the man.
