Review: The Machine

The Machine
Cert: 15 / 112 mins / Dir. Peter Atencio / Trailer

So wait, are we back to just taking the piss out of the Russians, now? Honestly, I can’t keep up. The Machine is American comedian Bert Kreischer, playing a heightened fictionalised version of himself in a tale that expands on his 2016 true-story*¹ standup routine of the same name, about the time he visited Russia through college and ended up with the mafia robbing a train. The film is set a decade after this, with mobsters tracking Bert down in the US to recover an antique watch which was stolen with the hoard. WIth his family in jeopardy, Bert has to travel to Russia and locate faces from his past to save him from gangsters of the present, so that he can have a future.

The first ten minutes of this film are essentially Bert Kreischer telling you how great Bert Kreischer is, before the other characters come on to spend the majority of the film telling you otherwise. I know who I believe.

FAVOUR

Mark Hamill (yes, that one) is along for the ride as Bert’s father Albert like he’s repaying a favour, a swathe of Eastern European performers fill out Russian Mafia roles with accents culturally insensitive enough to rival Black Widow, and Bert himself basically yells his way through the script like a competition-winner who can’t believe he’s on a film set, describing visual jokes after they’ve just occurred and using fuck-bombs to end scenes where writers Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes*² couldn’t come up with a punchline.

And fair play to Jimmy Tatro who plays young-Bert in the flashback segments, because his comic timing is even worse than his older counterpart’s.

UNDER FIRE

There’s the seed in here of a story about societal expectations, male bravado and toxic masculinity, and how they often combine in a digital age where people feel they have to be constantly in performance-mode, the curators of their own existence in a quest for the dopamine of adulation. That seed is not watered, though. Instead, it must have been a slow Friday in the Sony offices when they decided to bankroll what is essentially a mashup of a shit Melissa McCarthy comedy from ten years ago, and a shit Liam Neeson thriller from ten years ago.

A handful of decent gags (the majority of which are slapstick anyway) can’t make up for distractingly quirky subtitles, incoherent storytelling*³ and an artless screenplay.
The Machine is broken.

*¹ The general rule with standup of course is that when a comic tells you something is a true story, it almost certainly isn’t. They are devising, exaggerating and embellishing for comic effect. That’s okay, it’s their job. It only becomes a problem when they repeatedly insist that it’s all true. So let’s just file this one accordingly before it’s even begun.
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*² That’s right, Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes are the only credited writers in this. Not Bert Kreischer. If The Machine had been his story - his true story - Bert Kreischer would have got a writing credit. But he didn’t. Because this didn’t happen. Bert Kreischer is lying. For money. That’s what his job is.
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*³ Even if this was true (and remember, it’s not), The Machine would effectively be Bert Kreischer making a feature-length therapy-session roleplay to publicly absolve himself of his appalling behaviour in both the past and the recent-present, while only ‘succeeding’ in the nuts-and-bolts plot of the film by doubling down on his poor reputation rather than growing as a character. Precisely the sort of thing you’d expect in an Adam Sandler movie. Bert Kreischer is a shit Adam Sandler. There. Put that on the poster.
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