Trailer Talk: Red Band Trailer for Movie 43

Comedy Central has released the first red band trailer to the intriguing Movie 43, a film with a cast so big that we were surprised Garry Marshall wasn’t attached. The anthology sketch comedy (see: Kentucky Fried Movie) is directed by (deep breath) Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, Patrik Forsberg, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk and Brett Ratner. It is released in Australia on 31 January 2013 from Roadshow.

The cast list is even bigger with (gasp) Gerard Butler, Anna Faris, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Hugh Jackman, Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Kate Bosworth, Kate Winslet, Terrence Howard, Liev Schreiber, Justin Long, Kristen Bell, Patrick Warburton, Josh Duhamel, Jason Sudeikis, Chloe Grace Moretz, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jack McBrayer, Kieran Culkin and Chris Pratt.

At The Reel Bits, we don’t just post trailers now, we review them too. This is Trailer Talk. Check out our thoughts after viewing the trailer below.

Trailer Talk:

Trying too hard much? While it is true that we get to see Gerard Butler playing a gnome of some kind, on the evidence of this trailer it will be another in an endless series of films that run together as many bodily function jokes as humanly possible in a short period of time. While this might be a step up for Anna Faris from Scary Movie, What’s Your Number? and The Dictator, she begins the clip by asking someone to “poop on her”. Outrageous!

Individually, these gags work as a series of one-liners (barely), but like all sketch comedy, we imagine this will be hit and miss. In a ideal world, they would just stop writing the ‘misses’, and concentrate solely on the hits, but comedy is incredibly subjective. It’s an interesting experiment nonetheless, and there are certainly a decent amount of laugh-out-loud moments in this short trailer. Yet if they can’t maintain a consistency across 2½ minutes, we doubt their hilarity over 90 minutes. Even the heydey of the sketch comedy movies (which we haven’t seen since the late 1970s) struggled with this.

Bottom Line? If the film can keep above the bottom line, there looks like a decent amount of giggles to be had. Let’s hope we are laughing with the film and not at it.

Bits Rating: ★★½