Mess, featuring tasty bits

Rating: 7/10 (23 August 2002)

What probably happened was, the Coen brothers had a bunch of cool visual and story ideas they didn't know what to do with, and they decided to make a movie out of these disparate elements. The result is a bit of a mess. You can just hear the Coens saying, "Hey, what if there was this guy who's the ultimate slacker? And what if there were these guys who thought they were nihilists but were just a bunch of pathetic poseurs with exaggerated German accents who played geeky German electronic music on a puny ghetto blaster? What if-" - by this point they're already laughing themselves silly, and they're right: this stuff is very funny. But it doesn't add up to anything.
This is easily their most disjointed film (their only disjointed film, actually), and their least involving. But it's worth seeing once, if only for the wonderfully conceived central character (Jeff Bridges in a pitch-perfect performance); for Steve Buscemi's skillful, subtly hilarious puppy-dog performance; and for moments such as the narrator saying near film's end that "it's good to know the Dude's out there", a statement made humorous by the fact that the main character couldn't be less of a hero.