Cinemavenger

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Sorry to Bother You

If you had a problem with 1996's From Dusk till Dawn morphing from a standard-issue crime drama into a vampire flick halfway through, you are going to loathe the fuck out of Sorry to Bother You, a real-world workplace comedy that takes a shitdiculous detour into speculative sci-fi territory.

From Dusk till Dawn was written by "San" Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert "Texastino" Rodriguez, so the tonal whiplash wasn't totally unexpected, and the stakes were already low for this B-movie time-waster.  Sorry to Bother You was written and directed by Communist, hip hop rabble-rouser Boots "Charles Nelson" Riley as a call to arms for the upcoming - or ongoing, depending on your worldview - race/class war.  So where the former film's genre-mashing merely pissed off fanboys, the latter's derails what could've been a scathingly satirical political statement.

I'm a little surprised that the conspiracy theories aren't already flying.  How could Riley have so thoroughly stomped his own dick in the dirt unless the Republicans, the Pentaverate or some other incarnation of The Man had a Smith and Wesson to his sideburns?

Before it goes all cuntywampus, Sorry to Bother You doesn't entirely suck.  Cassius Green (Lakeith "Which Field?" Stanfield) is so poor that when he puts "forty on pump six" at the gas station he means forty cents.  Cash, as his sexy, loving, artist-activist, manic, pixie dreamgirlfriend Detroit (Tessa "The d'Urbervilles" Thompson) calls him, takes a job as a telemarketer to make ends meet.  At first, Cash couldn't sell smack to a junkie.  Then, on the advice of a more experienced coworker, Langston (Danny "Too Old For This Shit" Glover), Cash starts using his "White voice" (voiced by David "Kris" Cross), and he becomes a selling machine.

Or is that "sellout machine?"  Riley turns Cash into an Uncle Tom faster than that stingray turned Steve Irwin into croc food.  Just as the dramatic tension begins to build, the sci-fi clown car comes out of nowhere and t-bones Sorry to Bother You.  There are no survivors.

The final, fucked up 10% of this would-be statement movie makes the preceding not-totally-shitballs 90% a joke - a bad one at that - and turns the title into a lame-ass apology to the audience.

September 7, 2018