I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Having read the book a couple of years ago, I followed the movie's production blog with great excitement.

Tucker mentioned possible Oscar nomination for the script, more than $200M at the box office and revolutionizing Hollywood.

I walked into the theater with 2 other male friends in late 20s - both lawyers, one of whom actually went to Duke. We'd been in the bar for an hour before hand so in merry mood after several beers. One of the guys just picked up the bar girl he'd been after for months, so cause to celebrate. I love independent movies. Edgy scripts. Darkness and the anti-Hollywood approach. Swingers is one of my favorite comedies in the ilk. The perfect movie for the perfect evening ...

There were 4 other people in the cinema. Hmmm. It did not seem to bode well.

And the movie begins. I began with a grin on my face, prepared to laugh my ass off throughout.

About 40 mins in, I was still waiting to laugh. One of my friends, who hadn't read the book, was yawning. Two of the others in the cinema got up and left.

So, let me cut a long story short: Poor script. Underlit. Cheap grain. Little empathy for any of the characters; no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The story arc fell totally flat. I could live with all that if the thing was actually FUNNY. Alas, I managed a couple of forced chuckles.

We left the cinema with me having to apologize to my friend for having put him through the boredom. We should have carried on drinking in the bar instead of wasting our time on this film.

Tucker tipped this as a classic of our time. I'm not even sure it would have merited a straight to DVD release. He said it would top The Hangover in both acclaim, artistic merit and box office. Half a billion dollars later, wide critical and audience reception, and marked as one of the best comedies of the year, if he'd put that sentence in the script, it would have been the funniest line in the whole movie.

I gave this a 6/10 because I had some pretty good laughs throughout the movie. Some of the stories Tucker Max told were great. I'm a 24 year old college student and have a pretty dirty sense of humor. I wouldn't recommend this to my mom but I definitely would to my friends. I'm guessing the majority of the bad reviews came from older critics that are disgusted by the vulgarity of this movie. I do agree that the plot could have been improved. The stories were not quite as explicit as the book. The only character that I couldn't stand for the first hour of this movie was Jesse Bradford. He was very intelligent but a little over the top with his negative/depressing outlook on life(due to his recent break up). I would watch this movie again.

I had a chance to hear Tucker Max talk about the movie at a screening and he seemed quite confident that it would surpass Wedding Crashers as the highest grossing comedy of all time. After seeing the movie, it became quite clear that he was completely delusional. The movie has poor dialogue, a poor plot, and mediocre acting. I spent a little while trying to think of a redeeming quality, or any basis upon which I could recommend the movie to other people. I came up empty-handed.

If you are a huge Tucker Max fan and feel the urge to see the movie, just re-read the book. If you see the movie, you probably won't leave the theater as a fan anymore.

The lead characters of this movie are smart - this much is readily apparent early on. I get it.

What I don't think anyone involved in this movie gets is that "smart" and "not funny" are not mutually exclusive.

The characters in the movie are smarter than the people they encounter - great. How do they wield it? By lording it over them; it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Only someone extremely insecure would take pleasure in this. Descriptions of the Tucker Max character as being a sociopath are not an exaggeration. The problem is that - unlike No Country for Old Men or The Shining (also featuring sociopaths)- this is supposed to be a comedy.

In addition, for all the talk of the realism of the dialog, it just sounds fake. All the clever diatribes and snipes one after another just seem like things you wish you'd said after the fact.

Movies are supposed to be about escape and I just couldn't relax into a world where this guy gets away with so much crap and basically walks away unscathed, having learned nothing.

The positive reviews for this film seem fake.

No one who saw this movie could possibly claim that it's good. I daresay one would be hard pressed to even mouth the words "its okay".

This film was bad. Very bad. Even if I ignored the horrible production values, the characters were totally unlikeable and the jokes were either out-of-date, fell flat or were just crude shock talk someone tried to pass off as envelope-pushing edginess.

I loved the book, and I really wasn't expecting this film to be even half has good. BUT I EXPECTED FAR BETTER THAN THIS.

I'm more than disappointed. I'm disgusted.