TUSK review
There was a time I enjoyed Kevin Smith. Then ‘enjoyed’ morphed into ‘tolerated’, ‘tolerated’ to ‘dismissed’ and now ‘dismissed’ has turned into ‘loathed’. You would think that at this point (and with so many times at the bat) Smith would know his chosen craft. I mean, filmmaking’s an art, right? An expensive, time consuming, energy draining art.
I heard someone say “no one goes out to make a bad film”. Tusk is the exception to that rule. In spades. What’s worse, I don’t think it had to be. There’s a lot of interesting things happening in the first act, and I was kind of getting hooked-in (despite the moronic caricature Justin Long was playing). Michael Parks is really damned good, playing a weird Quebecois psycho — but by the time Johnny Depp shows up as an even weirder Quebecois psycho (a role that is probably the lowest I’ve ever seen Depp hit), I realized any merit put into the first act was just blind luck from a hack who can’t follow through on his own intentions or is too unsure of his own abilities to even know he’s got a good thing going.
And this is Smith’s biggest crime as a filmmaker: he’s completely insincere to the point of insulting. The movie ends with a note of melancholy and heartbreak — a staple in genre films, like Cronenberg’s The Fly — where not only the main character is damned, but those he cares about are in a level of hell as well. Then we cut to credits, where they roll on one side of the screen and Smith’s podcast plays on the other. He and his producer cobble the entire story of Tusk together, stoned as the day is long, including them tittering like schoolgirls through the melodramatic end. It’s obnoxious and insulting. How do you ask actors to trust you and your vision — to emote on camera — when your inspiration for the scene was just an ironic guffaw through toke intakes? At this point, we’re just watching some stoner’s hobby, whose purpose in making the film comes down to a twitter hashtag vote. How fucking sad is that?
