Day 6 -- Moving McAllister

Released: September 7th, 2007

Starring: Mila Kunis, Jon Heder, Benjamin Gourley

Writer/Director: Benjamin Gourley/Andrew Black

Description: Rick Robinson is a ladder-climbing law intern from Miami with four days until the Bar Exam. Desperate to score points with his boss, he commits to a favor he can't afford. He ends up in a rundown truck headed to L.A. with his boss's possessions, his Hollywood-bound niece, and her pet pig. Amidst hitch-hikers, breakdowns, and assorted local yokels, Rick finds love, life and maybe himself in this trans-American road trip from hell.

[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]

***

I know I warn about spoilers before the article, but I try to avoid them just so I don't potentially ruin a movie for someone. But for this "movie", I honestly don't care. The protagonist gets the girl. The end. Everything else in this movie is inconsequential. The jokes fall flat, the writing is bad, and the acting is absolutely horrendous.

Must like the last movie I reviewed, "Good Dick", the lead actor is also the writer. But that is where the similarities end. Benjamin Gourley uses way too many cliches in the writing of Rick and the performance of said character. He's supposed to be a kiss-ass guy that would do anything to get noticed, as well as being his law school valedictorian, but all he comes off as is a socially inept guy who would wither in a courtroom. It's easily one of the worst performance ever.

If that wasn't enough, he wrote the character of Orlie, played by Jon Heder, which was a bad mix of Napoleon Dynamite and his awful character from "Just Like Heaven".  I guess he was there for comic relief, but I didn't find him all that funny. I couldn't tell if it was Heder mailing it in, or that he had absolutely nothing to work with in the script.

If it wasn't for the on-screen charisma of Mila Kunis, who obviously was the reason I chose this "film", I don't think I would have watched past the first act. Her beauty is what attracts you to the screen, but her acting is what keeps you watching. Even though she didn't have much to work with either, she still gave far and away the best performance in the movie.

Gourley tried really hard to mix a road movie with the odd comedy of a Napoleon Dynamite, which was made more obvious by the inclusion of Heder, but failed miserably. There was also this Clark Kent to Superman transformation that involved his glasses, which he didn't wear for much of the third act. I don't know if that's what he was going for to make us believe Kunis' character would actually like him, or not, but I honestly don't care.

Rating: 2/10 -- Really failed in ever aspect of movie making. Looked like a "C" student's senior film.