Snatched

I like when my wife goes to the movie movies with me. She has a job so she can pay for tickets and a big tub of popcorn, which she usually lets me have some of. Plus, the way she polishes off two quarts of Mountain Dew during the trailers is one of the most erotic things I’ve ever seen. If she only could make love to me the way she does that soda. 

I ask her every week to go with me , but she rarely does. Part of it is because there is a shitload of PBS shows starring English dudes in waistcoats that she’d rather watch. Another part is that after ten hours a day sorting buttons and zippers at Suzy’s Fabricland she likes to stay home in her sweatpants (not buttons, no zippers) with a half dozen Lean Cuisines. And, sometimes I wonder if maybe a teeny-tiny bit of her says no to me because she says I’m embarrassing to be seen with in public.

I figure she’d go with me on Mother’s Day, though. I mean, we don’t have kids. At least none that we know about. Still, it’s a day of celebration of all mothers, and all the women who chose not to be mothers.  Although, Mrs. Filthy says she had no choice. Once she married me, she knew she would never bring a child into the world. She must hate this world.

I especially thought she’d want to go when she saw that those caring, thoughtful folks in Hollywood made a movie named Snatched, and it was special just for moms. She loves special holiday stuff: Christmas candy; Easter candy; Valentine’s Day candy etc. So, why not a movie?

I don’t know. All I know is she chose a day on her friend’s veranda drinking lime flavored Bud Light over a night out with the person whose diapers she changed. Just a few times, once when we were bedroom role-playing that I was a fetal alcohol syndrome baby and she was a misinformed babysitter, but still. You’re never going to be closer to being a mom than swaddling an ass in non-compostable plastics.

The upshoot of this story is that I spent Mother’s Day alone watching a lousy movie in a theater full of mothers and their daughters with shitty taste. These weren’t MILFs. I don’t where the fuck the MILFs go, maybe the zoo or fancy brunches with limitless mimosas, but they sure as hell don’t go to Amy Schumer movies. Just so nobody would think I was a weirdo, I told everyone--the box office, ticket taker, ushers and ladies sitting near me--that my mother had died suddenly, and that’s why I was alone.

It doesn’t matter who you see Snatched with: your mom; your child; or anyone else. Snatched is a steaming hot shit squirted right up onto the screen. 

I have this rule about comedies; they should be funny. Snatched isn’t. It starts out with a few jokes, mostly easy, and then it wilts faster than an old man’s dick in the peanut butter. The movie loses sight of the reason for its existence and involves itself in the predictable mechanics of getting unlikable people out of a sticky wicket. Like we give a shit whether these screaming asses survive.

Schumer plays a woman failing at life who has a trip planned to Ecuador but has nobody to go with her. She extorts her aging, emotionally fragile mother to go. Shortly after arriving, they are kidnapped. The rest of the movie is a straight fucking line. They escape their captors. Their captors chase them. They get away. Along the way they are meeting what I suppose someone might find as “colorful” characters, but were just a bunch of tired clichés. Why the fuck make a movie in a foreign country if you’re going to treat it like a theme restaurant? Hell, just film the God damn movie in a Rain Forest Cafe.

Schumer’s character’s unlikability is Snatched’s biggest problem. In an effort to stay “edgy” the movie lets her character be unemployable, friendless, whiny and self-absorbed. See, it says, she’s not the typical woman. And that’s fine, but there are a shitload more complex representations of the atypical woman than this. They can even have some redeeming qualities and still be unusual. 

During the course of Snatched’s 90 minutes, She doesn’t get better. Not really. She says the usual bullshit about seeing other people, but there is little in the movie to validate it. Mostly, it’s all too unoriginal to pay attention to. So, the movie ultimately boils down to two people the rest of us wouldn’t miss doing nothing more than saving their own asses. Who the fuck cares?

The movie also confuses crass with funny. That’s not to say crass can’t be fucking hilarious, but it’s an ingredient, not the whole damn cake. Snatched feels like a crappy late-era-after-they-completely-lost-it Farrelly Brothers movie groping in the dark for a gag, but with dumb and irredeemable women instead of dumb men. Any movie that is so desperate for laughs that it uses “Your tit is showing” first as a joke and then as a callback is starving. There is standard-issue farting and self-shitting where punchlines should be.

If Snatched is the best Hollywood for moms with all its millions and billions, then I don’t feel like such a bad son anymore. Or husband. I wish I could have tricked Mrs. Filthy into seeing it with me, because it’d probably make her appreciate me more. Two Fingers.