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Boat Trip
**
Cinema Releases - October 4, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
93 minutes. Directed by Mort Nathan. Written by William Bigelow, Mort Nathan,
Brian Pollack, Mert Rich. Starring Cuba Gooding Jr, Horatio Sanz, Roselyn
Sanchez, Vivica A. Fox, Roger Moore, Will Ferrell, Richard Roundtree, William
Bumiller.
I watch the career of Cuba Gooding Jr with a kind
of sick fascination. This is a guy who burst onto the scene with the emotion
of "Boyz N the Hood" and followed it up by winning an Oscar for his comic
energy in "Jerry Maguire". Now he has become one of the least reliable actors
in Hollywood, as if someone gave him a lot of secret cash to prove that Academy
Awards can ruin actors' paths.
Consider his last five pictures. "Snow Dogs" was
not just bad family entertainment, it was bad family entertainment with Michael
Bolton on the soundtrack. "Zoolander" and "Rat Race" are among the worst
big-budget comedies to ever come out of Hollywood. The thriller "In the Shadows"
hardly got a release: being honest, have you even heard of it? Before that
was "Pearl Harbor", whose title is now notorious enough to speak for
itself.
"Boat Trip" is not as embarrassing
as the trailer leads us to expect it will be, but for Cuba, it is not exactly
a step in the right direction. The film's premise involves two guys (Gooding,
Horatio Sanz) who go on a cruise to meet women and end up -- you guessed
it -- on a gay cruise. This idea is old in sitcomland. I actually have two
friends who went on holiday and found themselves in the middle of a gay carnival;
if their story was filmed realistically, I imagine it might have some laughs.
This film is just an excuse to show two straight men get a bit embarrassed
by "YMCA", before discovering women on the boat with whom they can fall in
love, at the same time as learning some tolerance.
Before the opening credits have finished, we've
already seen Cuba engage in conversation with his dog, puke on a woman's
breasts and turn to the camera to perform funny faces and hyperactive dancing.
Thankfully, things settle down. The general problem with "Boat Trip" is not
desperation but too many obvious set-ups and pay-offs. When a female Swedish
tanning team ends up having to climb onboard the cruise ship, and Sanz manages
to get one of the girls to sleep with him, we know he's instead going to
go into the room of their angry coach, because the movie has done a laborious
job of showing how the mix-up comes about. Sanz enters the room, gets kinky,
the coach beats him up, and we're not surprised. If we're not surprised,
why are we expected to laugh?
As with all silly comedies involving homosexuality,
there is a lispy faux-Puerto Rican queen prancing about the place and saying
things like, "O! Ju naughtay boythz!" We also witness an ice-sculpture water
fountain made to look like a collection of penises. Roger Moore puts in a
cameo as a forthright rich guy who takes a liking to Gooding and Sanz, and
suggestively licks sausages while talking to them. There's a very good scene
involving a banana, but I'll leave that one to your
imagination.
"Boat Trip" has such a lack of good jokes, and
a premise that invites comedic disaster so openly, that I'm surprised I wasn't
irritated by the movie too much. I sat blankly for most of the running time,
laughed once or twice, and mainly found myself somewhat grateful that the
filmmakers rarely attempted to go over the top. The things "Rat Race" will
do to a guy's standards, eh? I mean, this movie must be pretty bad if even
a Swedish tanning team can't earn it a good review.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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