B+

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters

By Nathan Rabin  |  April 13, 2007 | 5:18am
Film Reviews Film
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters

The audience for the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie can roughly be divided into fanatics convinced it'll be the most awesome movie ever, and casual fans worried that 87 minutes of the show's balls-to-the-wall smartass surrealism constitutes roughly 77 minutes too many. Like the recent Music And Lyrics, it opens with a sequence perfectly executed enough to ensure that nothing that follows will be anywhere near as good. Fittingly, the opening functions as a stand-alone bit, an aggressive parody of movie concession-stand ads delivered by the angriest group of anthropomorphic foodstuffs ever assembled. From there, the film takes the randomness and pop-culture geekdom dominating contemporary comedy to delirious new levels that eventually become exhausting. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters is a trip, a sustained Dadaist prank on Warner Brothers and the moviegoing public, but it's also an ordeal.

The extremely sketchy plot revolves around an ultra-powerful exercise machine called The Insane-O-Flex that has the power to destroy the universe, in addition to developing users' abs and pecs. Anti-heroes/sentient junk-food products Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad battle their arch-nemeses the Cybernetic Ghost Of Christmas Past From The Future, evil scientist Dr. Weird, and various space aliens for control of the Insane-O-Flex, in a struggle with universe-altering consequences.

That description makes the film seem far more lucid and comprehensible than it actually is. Like the ATHF television show, Colon Movie Film seemingly delights in making as little sense as possible. Its absurdist scenarios serve as little more than a ramshackle frame for bizarre non sequiturs, stoned pop-culture riffing, and some of the weirdest gags ever to make it into a studio-released film. It offers a rapid succession of possible origins for its lead characters, while sneering at the notion that it'd take its central creation story any more seriously than it takes anything else. To that end, the film jerks audiences from one wildly preposterous creation myth to another in a way that makes its bloated running time feel interminable. Colon Movie Film begins by living up to its fans' rabid expectations, and ends by justifying skeptics' doubts. In between lie roughly equivalent levels of tedium and hilarity.

Keep scrolling for more great stories from The A.V. Club.
 
Join the discussion...
SELECT permalink, ID FROM `pm_article_index` where`article_category` like '%|film|%' and ID<>1798202534 AND article_type like '%|reviews|%' ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 7;