The title of Say It Isn't So is a better review of the movie than anything I can write. Just when I thought I had seen the worst 2001 had to offer (Including, among others, Freddy Got Fingered, 3000 Miles to Graceland and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), this movie pops up on late night cable and makes me wish it hadn't. Let's be blunt; this movie stinks.
If there is a God in the universe in which this movie takes place, then Gilbert Noble (Chris Klein) is his favorite person to torture when He's having a bad day. Gillie is an orphan, a lonely guy working at his local animal shelter. He finds the love of his life Jo Wingfield (Heather Graham), but there's a problem. It seems that Jo's parents are also Gillie's. Jo leaves and finds another guy, when Gillie discovers that he isn't really her brother, so he heads after her.
The incest joke could, I suppose, have been good for one laugh in a movie. But as the WHOLE movie, it is a rather thin, and the script (by Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow) feels like a Farrelly Brothers ripoff, not the real thing. Odd since Peter and Bobby Farrelly are actually two of the producers on this movie.
As told in the film, everyone in the entire world except Gillie, Jo and one or two other characters, is cold, heartless, and greedy. Gillie is held to a standard of behavior whereby he would need precognitive telepathic abilities to act properly. Even though he didn't know he was sleeping with his sister, he is ridiculed mercilessly, scorned, and abandoned by his "parents." You feel bad for Gillie, especially since Jo is an awful mate, except that she looks like Heather Graham. They fall for each other as she gives him an awful haircut and cuts off his ear. This, Van Gogh fans, is played for laughs.
The movie is a series of low notes. I thought it couldn't get worse when Sally Field wiped her armpits with a sandwich to give to her stroke-inflicted husband, but that was before the movie shifted locations to Beaver, Oregon, hitting the audience over the head with Beaver joke after Beaver joke. They finally flog that bit to death, but just when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, Gillie sticks his arm in a bull's behind up to his shoulder, then gets dragged through town, then loses something in there he has to retrieve. Chris Klein, so good in Election and American Pie, followed those two fine movies with Say It Isn't So and Rollerball. Say this for him, it's only up from here.
The only reason to watch this movie is the soundtrack, featuring songs by Teenage Fanclub, Third Eye Blind, and others. I'd like to say skip the movie and get the soundtrack, but apparently the movie did so poorly they never even bothered to release it on CD. I know what you're thinking, "No soundtrack? Say it isn't so!"
