Top 250? You have to be kidding ...

Rating: 5/10 (17 February 2002)

I guess this is the Coen bros version of Dumb and Dumber. Dumb is Jeff Bridges as Lebowski, a middle-aged boozing and dope-smoking burnout, and dumber is John Goodman, an emotionally disturbed Vietnam vet. Throughout I was uncomfortable with not only the premise of the movie, which is that stupid and pathetic people are inherently funny, but with the portrayal of those characters, which was either accurate to the point of being unpleasant (Lebowski), or annoyingly unconvincing (Walter the vet).
Realism has worked for the Coen bros in the past because they've made it amusing or startling. Here realism is stupid people with limited vocabularies saying f**k every other word. Someone ought to count the number of times the word is used, it's got to be a record. I have nothing against the word, it has it's place and can be a regular bon mot. But no word can be used that much and retain its meaning -- it just becomes a sound, an annoying sound, like a barking dog. The script must be fairly ugly to see, with that same all over it like a printer glitch or something.
Then, surrounding the two dipsticks, you have an assortment of poorly conceived oddballs who are supposed to provide both the color and the framework of the plot, such as it is. That this is their purpose is so transparent the purpose is defeated, and we seek in vain to be amused by them for some -- any -- reason. Their sheer number is meant to make up for their shallowness I think. We have a pedophile, a lesbian, an expensive whore, a couple of moron tough guys, some German nihilists, a porno King, a cripple, a geek (who Goodman shouts at to shut up every time he speaks -- oh, that's rich), a "fascist" cop, a creepy gay weirdo, a smirking kissass etc. What fertile ground for comedy, yet nothing grows there. At one point, after being drugged (which in Lebowski's case was redundant) and then hit in the head with a coffee cup, Lebowski tells a cab driver to change the music because he doesn't like the Eagles, and the guy throws him out of the cab. Oh, chuckle chuckle, thrown out of a cab hah-hah. It's all about as amusing as having a tooth drilled. Even the musical interludes with spacy dream graphics are tedious.
In summary: no good music, bad acting, boring plot and vapid script. To see this tripe in the top 250 along with movies like the original Planet of the Apes, or From Here to Eternity -- that's a mistake, all I can say. It must be all on Coen bros brand name alone. Either that or I f**king don't know what the f**k is going on, know what I mean?