Sunny checked another item off the list of “Philadelphia things it needs to spoof” tonight with a rather batty extended M. Night Shyamalan spoof episode. There were crazy twists, shocking violence and a lot of mentions of Dolph Lundgren. One fatal flaw, however: even the shittiest Shyamalan movie always has an appearance by the director himself, and I was sad he didn’t show up to pay tribute to Philly.
You could view “Mac and Charlie Write a Movie” through meta-glasses and see it as a bizarro take on Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day, years ago, trying to write a project to make themselves stars (I realize Glenn Howerton also developed Sunny; it’s a weak metaphor). I mean, the last time M. Night Shyamalan was even remotely cool was what, nine, ten years ago? Anyway, Charlie and Mac, rebuffed by Dennis for telling a boring story about getting locked in a stairwell, set about writing an awesome movie to pitch to M-Night, because Dee’s a “featured actress” in his new flick.
Problems arise pretty quickly, though. Charlie’s concept of storytelling is predictably warped; he thought the fact that Bruce Willis wore a hairpiece throughout The Sixth Sense was the big twist. Things get off on the right foot when they decide to resurrect Dolph Lundgren’s career (it never took off, because of his spiky hair) and cast him as a scientist (in a mesh tank top, not a silly lab coat), but Charlie, as he does with all his creative endeavors, keeps sidetracking things. What if he can smell crime…and he runs on all fours…because he’s a dog, VOICED by Dolph Lundgren? Barring that, what if his head is a giant nose?
The script-writing scenes were good, but I especially appreciated that next to Charlie’s madness, Mac’s still-awful ideas about a muscular scientist who can smell crime (and fights it with his brain AND his brawn) seems like a workable movie. The two then follow the general pecking order the show established last episode and take the idea to Dennis, but he’s much more interested in a film where Dolph performs outrageous sexual experiments on a lab assistant’s supple body. "Now here's the twist…we show it. We show all of it," he crows. That’s right, full penetration. Hopefully not from his preferred angle, which focuses on the balls, if you remember.
Dennis’ ideas are even more avant-garde than Charlie’s: Dolph cracks skulls, bones the assistant, cracks skulls, etc., until the movie just sort of ends. Charlie thinks audiences will be uncomfortable at Dolph's naked penis going into the young girl, but Dennis does not care. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to hear Frank’s ideas – instead he got cast as the Ari Gold of the episode, except he didn’t really do anything funny, or anything at all, except eat sausage links out of his front pocket. I don’t like it when Sunny wastes Frank in an episode that focuses so clearly on sexual peccadilloes.
A further scene where the guys call on the talents of a Pakistani kid from Baltimore to help them write the script didn’t really work for me either. I liked Charlie calling the workhorse secretaries of the world “judgmental” but the joke about the kid seemed to be that he was South Asian, like M. Night Shyamalan, which wasn’t particularly original. Maybe they just didn’t give him enough funny lines (although he dug the penetration!)