The Flip Side (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Struggling chef Ronnie (Emily Taheny) gets a call from famous actor Henry (Eddie Izzard), one of her former employers, that he and his girlfriend Sophie (Vanessa Guide) will be in Sydney for a screening of his new film and if they wanted to catch up. Ronnie's boyfriend Jeff (Luke McKenzie) agrees and, as the four start to catch up, Ronnie struggles with telling Jeff that Henry not only used to be her lover, but that they might still have romantic feelings for each other.

Taheny manages to do quite a lot with very little, getting across the bubbling dread of her character’s circumstances rather effectively. I swear, every time Jeff insists that Henry sticks with them for whatever they happen to be doing, she looks like she’s about to throw up and clock Jeff in the face at the same time. Speaking of Jeff, for a character that largely exists to be annoying and Ocker as all hell, McKenzie is more watchable than he has any right to be. Izzard… okay, as much as I want to rail against why he’s even in this film in the first place (and I will, in due time), credit to him for still being quite charming and enjoyably vain as an on-screen presence.

 

And then there’s Guide, who is basically every single French stereotype you’ve ever heard made manifest: Catty, callous, conceited and quite adamant about how much everything that isn’t French is bad. Partial credit for having a dig at our nation’s internet which… yeah, it is pretty shit, but that’s still a nugget of genuine observation in a sea of absolute unwatchability. It got to the point where I thought the character had been run over near the end, and quite frankly, you could measure my disappointment that that didn’t happen on the Richter scale.

So, let’s get into Izzard’s casting here, because him being easily the most recognisable face here (aside from a brief but extremely welcome appearance from Tiriel fuckin’ Mora as a fuckin’ mechanic) already set off some alarm bells right from the start. Mainly because I’ve seen this ploy used in Aussie films before. Basically, it’s the same idea that went into Simon Pegg appearing in Kill Me Three Times or Jason Isaacs being in Red Dog: True Blue: Hire one famous actor, and have everyone else in the cast in orbit around them. It’s a trick that is usually done when the film said actor is now attached to is so bland and otherwise uninteresting that the sheer star power should get at least a few butts in cinema seats. And man, nothing encapsulates bland and uninteresting quite like the “plot” of this movie.

This is easily the most straight-forward rom-com I’ve seen in a very long time, and I mean that in the worst possible way. Aside from its narrative progression of a glorified road trip, where neither the participants nor the pit stops are worth paying attention to, the story itself is built on one of the other most annoying rom-com tropes, outside of the Third-Act Break-Up: People keeping secrets for no good reason. Not only that, these are secrets that the audience is made aware of right from the start, meaning that the film amounts to a lot of waiting around for the other shoe to drop and for the yelling to start. In-universe yelling, at least; the act of sitting through this much nothing will probably make the audience want to start yelling well before we even get to that point.

 

Mainly due to how, because of how the couplings are arranged and their chemistry with each other, the film keeps pushing towards a single scenario for the end (both couples doing a partner swap for something they get along better with). But even that ends up being a red herring because said swap would mean that something actually happens. And we apparently can’t have any of that around here.

Even when shit does happen, it’s all so inexplicable that reactions will vary from dull surprise to dull falling-asleep-in-your-seat. There’s a scene where the car the main four are riding in runs into a kangaroo and Denise Haratzis’ editing is so jarring that it effectively emulates the feeling of whiplash. Not sure if that was the intended effect or not, but at least it’s something. Well, something that doesn’t involve sudden character backstory about gruesome murder and dismemberment that not only comes out of nowhere, but it couldn’t be any less clear if it was meant to be funny or not. When dealing with a moment where a character talks about someone getting a post-mortem penectomy, that isn’t something an audience should be confused about. Kind of like being confused at how the combination of a boomerang and the aforementioned car make it look like the film is about to take a very sudden, dark turn. But again, nothing comes of it; just more awkward conversation. Awkward, painful, makes-you-want-to-recede-into-your-chest-like-a-goddamn-turtle conversation.

And we haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet. No, that comes with what I highly suspect is the ulterior motive of this little production. It starts with the casting of Eddie Izzard, but then there’s also the involvement of 20^th Century Fox alongside national film trust Screen Australia. We even get an all-marimba version of the 20^th Century Fox studio theme, because this film can’t even get past the admittedly well-framed credits before it starts being inexplicably irritating.

 

Basically, this feels somewhat like it’s an attempt to reach a wider audience, one that isn’t confined to Australian borders. Along with Izzard and the inclusion of Fox, there’s also this weird moment where the characters just start talking about The Castle, in one of the worst moments of breaking the “don’t reference a better movie in the middle of your shitty one” rule I’ve ever seen. Considering The Castle’s place in Aussie cinematic history, along with the mainstream push behind the scenes, maybe this was meant to show our quirkier side to a Western audience. Of course, this could just be me scrambling to find some reason, any reason, why this thing even exists in the first place, but even if this were true, this is leagues below the kind of content we are capable of making.

All in all, way to make Chasing Comets look like Hacksaw Ridge in comparison to how much fucking nothing is to be found here. The acting is passable, the camera work by Steve Arnold has some pretty good framing to it and there’s a couple of moments with decent wordplay in the dialogue but… fucking hell, this is bad. The characters are obnoxious, and not in any of the entertaining ways, the writing is mostly weak and did I mention how boring the non-events masquerading as a plot are? This was physically painful to sit through and, even though it somewhat pains me even more to say it, this film bombing as badly as it at the box office right now is the only form of joy I can squeeze out of this whole experience.