puzzle

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2011)

Comedy is a hard genre. It's really hard to find talented comedy actors that make us laugh without feeling empty in doing it. I'm not talking about the easy laugh of an arranged false situation where you just laugh at the awkwardness of the scene. True comedy is closer to true drama than to anything else. That's what i think. But once in a while, one can find a decent comedy, that succeeds in the performances. More rare is to watch something that does something interesting on the narrative level. This is the case.
The performances are standard routine in what concerns today's physical acting and word timing. This is the part of the thing that usually gets outdated so soon, so i suspect that in 15 years we'll no longer laugh at the phrasing, timing, or even most of the written jokes. Zach Galifianakis is the exception. He acts really funny because he's the only character who doesn't act to be funny. He doesn't force his comic act into the audiences. He stands outside the comic forces of the film, quite literally, as his character is an alien forced upon the well acquainted group. So he just stands there, and there resides the fun of his performance.
The nice thing here is done on the narrative structure of the thing. The story is about a group of guys who don't remember what happened the night before (drugs, booze, etc.). They are given clues (the baby, the tiger, the police car) which are the links to those unremembered events. Following those leads, in a sort of a twisted detective story mechanics, they will be able to retell the events they don't remember. So, the narrative structure is that these characters will reveal a story that has already happened, to Them! This is a fun concept, and a clever device. And it is really rare to find clever structures applied to mainstream comedy.
Well the unveiling of the missing puzzle pieces of their night is not as great as it might have been. The Mike Tyson episode is forced upon the narrative, probably there to include Tyson and sell some more tickets with his presence, but it just feels out of place, a scene from another movie. But overall, this is OK.
My opinion: 3/5
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