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| The poster is honestly the worst part about the movie. I have no idea what it signifies other than pure horror. |
Smosh: The Movie happens to be my very first encounter with
Smosh and anything related to the Smosh lore, or whatever. I know nothing about
them beyond the fact that they’re a really popular comedic YouTube channel (at
one point the most subscribed channel on the site, which is really saying
something) and Red vs. Blue made a reference to them, like, once. I was told,
however, I wasn’t going to like it, that it would be awful. So, naturally, I
checked it out as quickly as possible, and luckily Netflix had it. I walked in with
absolutely no bias towards Smosh, and this movie would either make or break my
opinion towards Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, creators of some of the most
popular videos on YouTube I’ve actually never gotten around to watching. I’m
comparing it to nothing at all. I cannot say if the quality of the movie
matches the videos. It could be unambiguously worse than anything else
involving the broish comedic duo, or it could unambiguously better.
It was actually pretty okay.
This isn’t the first time a YouTube channel has made its way
onto the big screen. I think that honor might have to go to Fred: The Movie
(and its apparent many sequels), an invisibly mediocre film that was
nevertheless a much better candidate to be made into a movie than Smosh. Fred’s
multiple videos have (or had, I haven’t watched the channel in years, not that
it was ever the stuff of hefty analysis) a vague sense of consistency between
them that could have been easily fitted into the normal beats of an American
kid-focused film. There was Fred, his mother, the girl he liked, the
stereotypical bully, the faraway dad, blah blah blah. Fred was born to be made
into a crappy film, which it was. Smosh isn’t; their shtick is skit comedy and
one-shot comedy videos, with no genuine sense of continuity. That kind of
material is considerably harder to adapt into a coherent, consistent film.
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| Also, Steve Austin as himself. Give me a hell yeah. |
But they try to do that anyway, with occasional success and
occasional failure. The plot follows as such: Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox
(starring as themselves) are two slackers who live with Ian’s classically white,
bland parents. The only one trying to get his life back in order is Anthony,
who has a gig as a pizza delivery boy. Ian just lounges around and obsesses
over videos of a girl getting her butt massaged, whom he affectionately calls
Butt Massage Girl (get used to hearing that). They dick around for about ten
minutes before the actual story happens; their 5-year high school reunion is
approaching, and Anthony sees this as a chance to finally confess his love for
Anna Reid, an activist for people who suffer from Ring Finger Largeasia, a
disease that apparently kills people whose ring finger is larger than their
index finger (I happen to suffer from this). But, alas, there is an embarrassing
YouTube video of Ian on the reunion page, so embarrassing it undergoes a
meteoric rise in popularity in the span of a few hours (realistically enough, surprisingly; it gets about 700+ views total by the time the movie ends).
Ian wants the video taken down in the hopes that Anna never
sees the video; they hop off to the headquarters of YouTube, where they meet
the profoundly weird, idiosyncratic Steve YouTube, who tells them that although
a video cannot be deleted, it can be altered to have a more favorable outcome,
via a cyberspace portal located in his closet. Ian and Anthony hop through the portal
and enter into the world of YouTube itself, and it’s around this point the film
gets really terrific.
Well, alright, not “really terrific”. This isn’t a comic
masterpiece; in fact, the biggest problem with the writing is how often it
veers from inspired to stupid and back again in the blink of an eye. It is, at
once, surrealistic, and very generic and simple; impossible to look away from,
yet impossible to take seriously. But if there’s one thing the film definitely
has going for it, it’s that the parts involving Ian and Anthony’s journey
through YouTube are by far and away the best parts in the film. It’s a finer
line than you think; it manages to rip apart and deconstruct everything that’s
stupid and odd about YouTube (they travel through bad music videos, horrendous
advertisements, vlogs, and even videogame play-throughs, and these are just the
ones I can think about off the top of my head), yet it’s done with a lot of
love. The film never does shake the feeling that its natural home is on
YouTube, but that gives it a certain amount of charm and finesse.
But therein lies the problem. The film never does shake the feeling
that its natural home is on YouTube, and it shows. It’s anything-goes kind of
writing is perfectly suited to an eleven-minute skit on Adult Swim I would
totally watch, or even a half-hour short film, but not an eighty-minute movie
with a storyline, character arcs, and big-screen visuals. The “Real World”
parts of the movie are hokey and kind of slow, especially in comparison to the
wicked pacing of the “YouTube World” parts. The protagonists, two idiots who
mean well, are somewhat enjoyable and easy to root for, but they’re given an
incredibly generic “person learns to just be himself” character arc that, while
nice and a good moral, is one of the dominant themes of, like, everything. The
one-note personalities of the other characters make them feel more like plot
devices rather than characters; the only ones I could ever get behind were
Steve YouTube, who was funny when he wasn’t used for dick jokes, and Diri, a
tongue-in-cheek ripoff of Siri that even the characters note is no different
from the actual product. The cinematography is… okay. Just, okay. It gets by.
And there are a few points when it becomes more endurance test than film,
seeing how long we can withstand the nonstop stupidity, the dick jokes, the occasionally
grotesque violence, and utter chaos. Even the rock-inspired soundtrack doesn’t
have much going for it; I’m struggling to remember what the opening theme was.
This isn’t to say the film wasn’t enjoyable. The film is
creative, and occasionally delightful; the various cameos of people like YouTube
stars Markiplier, Steve Austin, and Jenna Marbles work in the film’s favor, and
it winds up being more of a love letter to YouTube than a piss-take of YouTube;
it never mocks it audience nor panders towards it. But the film is also very “normal”
and generic, with its “be yourself” theme and tendency to use lowbrow / nerd
humor as cheap jokes. Couple that in with all-over-the-place pacing (it is at
once too fast and too slow) and you get a film that ultimately lacks the
necessary impact it was going for.
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