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Critic's Grade: B
The time had come, said Kevin Smith, to talk of
many things. After the embittered distribution struggles surrounding 2011's Red State, the unsinkable icon of DIY
cinematic half-assery had seemingly retired from the moviemaking and engaged
his loyal fan base only through a garrulous weekly podcast. [if gte mso 9]>
Riffing off the neuroses that would conceivably inspire such a request, Smith found himself spitballing a personalized tweak of the threadbare shock-and-eww vehicles of yesteryear, and, by podcast's end, had talked up a workable treatment. Convinced that appropriate presentation lay beyond the powers of the current industry, Smith asked his audience to decide through massed tweets whether or not he should take up the project himself, and 15 months later—the average gestation period for a walrus, oddly enough—this strange, strange creature, Tusk, crawls into theaters.
Throughout the opening, as Wallace (Justin Long) needles shlumpy podcast partner Haley Joel Osment and threads long-suffering girlfriend Genesis Rodriguez, a droll undercurrent of barbed inanities stirs up Smith's usual tropes—fetishized boyishness, self-defeating egotism, the peculiar dynamics of asocial friendship—but the visuals keep pace with the headlong rush of dialogue, which is no small detail. Smith's writerly gifts have been hamstrung by an almost defiant directorial sloppiness for so long that even workmanlike efforts startle. There's not a memorable image to be found, the editing never what you'd call taut, but common-sense cuts and camerawork are all that's needed with a scripted narrative predisposed to take on the heavy lifting.
Since Wallace never once stops outlining his plans and emphasizing his primary motives, we gamely suspend disbelief when the host jumps a flight to Manitoba to exploit a sudden meme casualty (awkward teen loses a limb to swordplay mishap) without any assurance of an interview or secondary plan. When public ridicule leads the boy to suicide and Wallace despairs of ever finding one exploitable eccentric in the whole of Canada worthy of serving as a replacement, we ask no questions when a note tacked onto a urinal bulletin board (an entreaty for free lodging from a lonely senior eager to share stories of a life at sea) spurs Wallace to drive hours and hours into the dark woods that very night. Blithely insulting each Canadian he meets, Long has such fun dancing around the glib vacancies of a millennial careerist—the sort of soulless striver who wields an aggressively wrong mustache as unironic talisman—that it's almost a shame when he finally reaches the enormous, ornate craftsman lodge of Michael Parks' Howard Howe.
Smith proves himself more than capable of wringing suspense from the ridiculous while juggling psychological trauma alongside bucketloads of gore. Just as Silent Bob's eventual speech achieved an altogether undeserved poignancy, there's a genuinely chilling effect when Howe first muffles Wallace and the monomaniacal chatter driving the film's momentum suddenly disappears.
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WWeek 2015