Bro, What Happened?

[StevePulaski]

Bro, What Happened? (2014)
Directed by: Dante

Daniel Skelton and Jamie Kennedy in Bro, What Happened?.

Rating: ★½

Bro, What Happened? is a throwaway, straight-to-DVD comedy that is so brazen in its insincerity as a comedy that it doesn't disguise it is practically a retread of The Hangover, right down to its credits, filled with images and videos recapping a party, and Superbad, with its two leads looking practically like the dopplegangers of Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. The film plays like one of those sequels to a successful comedy that wasn't conceived until years after its predecessor's release, like Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation or Road Trip: Beer Pong, in look and presentation, where it seems producers just cast every young person they could find on large college campuses and shot it right in the middle of a weekend campus party.

The title of the film is the exact question I kept asking myself as I heard each failing joke, viewed each grotesque scene, or was subjected to an endless array of juvenile sight-gags involving such hilarious topics as anal sex and diarrhea. What happened to wit, the idea of characters, or the conception of concocting a film similar in mood and focus of the films this particular project seems so keen in trying to emulate? Rather than going straight for the punchline, why couldn't the director (who goes by the sole name of "Dante" and has his name on films like InAPPropriate Comedy and The Underground Comedy Movie for the record) and the trio of writers find the joys of depicting college life in a simultaneously realistic and humorous sense?

The film concerns two dolts who wake up one morning to realize that the best party of their life occurred last night but they cannot seem to remember anything about it. They wake up to find a man named "MF Bob" (Jamie Kennedy in one of his laziest roles to date) cooking bacon in the kitchen and a house destroyed, obviously meaning something totally wild took place last night. Furthermore, the one's girlfriend is coming to visit him in a matter of hours, but neither of them can seem to illustrate what took place the previous night. Thus, they need to be reminded by other individuals who didn't consume enough alcohol to experience short term memory loss, so most of the film takes place in flashback, recounting a night filled with drugs, alcohol, and debauchery.

Watching a comedy like this only reminds me why comedies like American Pie, The Hangover, and Superbad succeed so overwhelmingly compared to this. For starters, there's a story to latch on to in each one of those films, but there is also the element of character and focus in those films that reminds one of their own life or at least transports them into the lives of other characters with realistic issues. If we want to compare Bro, What Happened? to the film it wants to be, The Hangover for a younger crowd, just contemplate what the film lacks compared to it. Besides stripping the mystery down to being a perfunctory plotpoint, there are also no characters who fascinate because of their commonality (all of them function like the most empty-headed fratboys this side of the quad), there are little to no scenarios that utilize character to make their jokes or setups effective, and whenever the film feels desperate enough, it decides to incorporate sight-gags in hopes you'll smirk. The film is the definition of a cop-out comedy - a comedy that looks to find the easy way out of setting up a story or analyzing the anatomy of a joke in order to get to the joke.

Bro, What Happened? is just another interchangeable direct-to-DVD comedy, boasting talents like Jamie Kennedy and Bobby Lee on the front of their cover to include them in the film for performances just longer than a cameo, and continues to follow the trend set forth by Dude, Where's My Car?. That particular trend seems to be the more punctuation in a comedy's title, the dumber it has to be.

Starring: Daniel Skelton, Jamie Kennedy, Bobby Lee, and Lorenzo Lamas. Directed by: Dante.