Made For Each Other is pretty much like a live action version of the cartoon show Family Guy, except not one of the good episodes. This is like one of those Family Guy shows where you become convinced that Seth MacFarlane has gotten too rich and is just mailing it in. This film is the same non-stop avalanche of gags, flashbacks and cutaways, but most of them aren't funny and more than a few leave you wondering how they were supposed to be funny in the first place. During this whole movie, I laughed only twice when it randomly veered off into some inspired lunacy. The rest of the time, I self-satisfyingly smirked at how forced and awful it all is.
Dan (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) is a newlywed who hasn't had sex with his wife (Bijou Phillips) in the three months since their wedding and everyone in town knows about it. Let me stop right here because the previous line gets at the heart of what's wrong with Made For Each Other. How does everyone in town know Dan isn't getting any? Not only is their no explanation, there's no possible explanation. More importantly, why does everyone know? It doesn't make sense and serves no purpose other than to facilitate a handful of lame jokes in a script already bursting with them. It immediately creates this cartoonish (in a bad way) sensibility that undercuts every following attempt at exaggerated or absurd humor. Most importantly, the whole plot of this movie turns on a secret plan of Dan's and another secret of his wife's. If everybody knows about Dan's embarrassing marital trouble, why don't they know about the other two secrets? Comedy, even at its more skewed and bizarre, needs an internal logic and reality. Without it, it takes absolutely razor sharp, brilliant wit that can stand independent of character and circumstance. The wit of Made For Each Other is about as sharp as an egg and as brilliant as a cast member of Teen Mom or The Jersey Shore.
Anyway, the sexually frustrated Dan winds up boinking his sister-in-law (Lauren German) and turns to his loser group of friends for advice. His buddy Mike (Samm Levine) suggests maneuvering Dan's wife into cheating on him, thereby inclining her to forgive his infidelity. Dan turns to an atrociously conceited traveling actor (Patrick Warburton) to do the deed, comes to regret that decision and things kind of dribble off after that. Oh, and Mike winds up screwing Dan's mom and then lying about being gay to cover it up. Yup, that's right. Straight guy awkwardly pretending to be gay is considered to be comedy gold in this thing.
Unlike a shockingly large number of alleged comedies, Made For Each other makes a concerted effort at being funny. It makes more attempts at humor in 5 minutes than many low-budget indy flicks do in their entire run time. But the overwhelming majority of them not only fall flat, they burrow into the ground like a frightened gopher. Let me give you another example. When Dan goes to meet the conceited actor, he first has to deal with the actor's imperious assistant (Debargo Sanyal). The assistant is first presented to the audience as this pretentious hanger on who thinks the actor is a great man and derives his own sense of importance from being a great man's assistant. Before the scene is over, the assistant has become a bitter ball of resentment who knows the actor is a buffoon and seethes at being subservient to him. Now, if the character had been played one way or the other consistently, that may have been funny. If he started out one way and later on, after the movie set up the joke, his real personality came out, that may have been funny. To have the character's personality do a 180 degree flip in the middle of his first scene, for no reason whatsoever, isn't funny. It's stupid.
That's what Made For Each Other is like. There's no design or form or even intent to its humor. It's a bunch of guys who think they're funny flailing around on screen, while other guys who think they're funny flail around behind the camera. Now, I did laugh twice during this movie and it's possible others might get a guffaw or giggle out of stuff like a musical version of Waterworld of the inscrutable accent of Dan's sister-in-law. Mostly though, this is the sort of motion picture that leaves you sitting in your chair, thinking "Even I could do better than this". Skip it.
Dan (Christopher Kennedy Masterson) is a newlywed who hasn't had sex with his wife (Bijou Phillips) in the three months since their wedding and everyone in town knows about it. Let me stop right here because the previous line gets at the heart of what's wrong with Made For Each Other. How does everyone in town know Dan isn't getting any? Not only is their no explanation, there's no possible explanation. More importantly, why does everyone know? It doesn't make sense and serves no purpose other than to facilitate a handful of lame jokes in a script already bursting with them. It immediately creates this cartoonish (in a bad way) sensibility that undercuts every following attempt at exaggerated or absurd humor. Most importantly, the whole plot of this movie turns on a secret plan of Dan's and another secret of his wife's. If everybody knows about Dan's embarrassing marital trouble, why don't they know about the other two secrets? Comedy, even at its more skewed and bizarre, needs an internal logic and reality. Without it, it takes absolutely razor sharp, brilliant wit that can stand independent of character and circumstance. The wit of Made For Each Other is about as sharp as an egg and as brilliant as a cast member of Teen Mom or The Jersey Shore.
Anyway, the sexually frustrated Dan winds up boinking his sister-in-law (Lauren German) and turns to his loser group of friends for advice. His buddy Mike (Samm Levine) suggests maneuvering Dan's wife into cheating on him, thereby inclining her to forgive his infidelity. Dan turns to an atrociously conceited traveling actor (Patrick Warburton) to do the deed, comes to regret that decision and things kind of dribble off after that. Oh, and Mike winds up screwing Dan's mom and then lying about being gay to cover it up. Yup, that's right. Straight guy awkwardly pretending to be gay is considered to be comedy gold in this thing.
Unlike a shockingly large number of alleged comedies, Made For Each other makes a concerted effort at being funny. It makes more attempts at humor in 5 minutes than many low-budget indy flicks do in their entire run time. But the overwhelming majority of them not only fall flat, they burrow into the ground like a frightened gopher. Let me give you another example. When Dan goes to meet the conceited actor, he first has to deal with the actor's imperious assistant (Debargo Sanyal). The assistant is first presented to the audience as this pretentious hanger on who thinks the actor is a great man and derives his own sense of importance from being a great man's assistant. Before the scene is over, the assistant has become a bitter ball of resentment who knows the actor is a buffoon and seethes at being subservient to him. Now, if the character had been played one way or the other consistently, that may have been funny. If he started out one way and later on, after the movie set up the joke, his real personality came out, that may have been funny. To have the character's personality do a 180 degree flip in the middle of his first scene, for no reason whatsoever, isn't funny. It's stupid.
That's what Made For Each Other is like. There's no design or form or even intent to its humor. It's a bunch of guys who think they're funny flailing around on screen, while other guys who think they're funny flail around behind the camera. Now, I did laugh twice during this movie and it's possible others might get a guffaw or giggle out of stuff like a musical version of Waterworld of the inscrutable accent of Dan's sister-in-law. Mostly though, this is the sort of motion picture that leaves you sitting in your chair, thinking "Even I could do better than this". Skip it.
