The Darwin Awards (2006)
Genre: Adventure
Format Viewed: DVD
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
You know those kind of movies where you sit up 90 minutes later and find yourself scratching your head, befuddled as to why someone would even attempt to create a movie out of an otherwise entertaining concept?
I give you The Darwin Awards.
The movie caught my eye while browsing around NetFlix late one night. Way back in the very early days of Just Laugh (1999, maybe?), the creator of the Darwin Awards website allowed us to reprint a few stories for the very first issues of our online magazine. I became a big fan of the tales and have collected all of the books over the years, so when I noticed that a movie had been released, I just had to wonder how it turned out. Of course, we all know all too well that Hollywood sometimes has a habit of latching onto the most minute of details and trying to stretch them out into a full-length feature because you know, if it can be successful in any other medium, why wouldn’t it be successful on the big screen?! That kind of mentality has gotten us dozens of comic book movies that should’ve stayed in print, countless 90-minute-renditions of our favorite TV shows, and even a couple of flicks based on Dave Barry’s books, which still baffles me because they were good books, but not-so-good movies. And I truly hoped that The Darwin Awards wouldn’t follow that same path towards mediocrity, but I still had that aching feeling as I pushed the play button on my DVD player…
What killed it for me, not only in this movie, but for so many of those other flops that I previously mentioned, is that the story just felt so lifeless and lacking, almost as if it was phoned in by an advertising executive while he’s driving through a tunnel and trying to also read the newspaper at the same time. It didn’t feel like any real effort had been made to come up with a believable storyline – more so “These Darwin stories are pretty funny … how can we weave a bunch of them together into a script?” The story jumped from place to place seemingly without direction, and several of the happenings just seemed unnecessary (why was Fez in this movie, for example?!). Frankly, it was almost as if the story itself knew that they were kind of pushing it with this movie and was just sort of along for the ride, whether that meant splashing into a lake or into the side of a mountain.
The actors themselves were ok, at best – Joseph Fiennes as the lead reminded me of a role that Luke Wilson could’ve played, who in fact might’ve looked better alongside Winona Ryder anyways. Frankly, I was surprised to see her because I honestly can’t remember her work for anything since those “shopping incidents” a few years back. Aside from that, it was kind of neat to see the two guys from Myth Busters make a cameo, and David Arquette’s appearance was forgettable at best.
I wish Hollywood would take a page from the lackluster results that we’ve seen time and time again and not take a page and try to convert it into a movie when that’s clearly not the best avenue to expand a creative idea. Sure, an awful lot of the best movies of all time have been adapted from books, but there’s also a significant handful that have been truly awful, meaning simply that there’s got to be someone that looks beyond all of the projected figures that will just admit, “Yeah, these are funny on the website or in the books, but they just wouldn’t be a good fit for Hollywood.” Trying to convert The Darwin Awards to a feature length film is the equivalent of trying to convert volumes A-L of the encyclopedia into a feature length film – seriously, what’s the point?
Some things are just better enjoyed in small doses…
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