In certain films the audience can gage the trajectory, style, and even quality of the entire movie within the first few frames. In Terrence Malick's heartbreaking war opus The Thin Red Line, we see an alligator - captured with National Geographic crispness, fluidity, and mystique - peering out into the battle-ravaged island of Guadalcanal before dipping back into the water. In Quinten Tarantino's self-stamped "masterpiece," Inglorious Bastards, we see an expansive, lush French countryside glow in stillness like a Turner landscape until a Nazi caravan silently creeps into the frame along a dirt path. In the film adaptation of Tucker Max's debacherous memoir I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, we see Max's bare body as he indulges in a love scene with a deaf girl. Seconds later, the cops barge in and the deaf girl explains that she wasn't being raped. End scene. When the American Film Institute ranks the top 100 scenes in film history, this gem will surely find itself comfortably embedded well within the top 25.
When critics chronicle books that should have remained in their original medium, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell will shine as one of the most elemental and first-taught examples, just as Marbury v. Madison will reign as an elemental and first-taught Supreme Court case. Tucker Max has proudly established himself as king of the tools, pumping out two uproarious memoirs - Assholes Finish First and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell - and running one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. Through his writing, he has fashioned the smutty side of the American Dream into literary joy. College students today discuss and quote his work more frequently than almost any literary figure in history. But as the film makes abundantly obvious, Tucker Max's charm and power arises from his readers living vicariously through him as they read. By converting his drunken stories into a movie - and a slipshod, mish-mash, crude movie at that - the audience loses its ability to live through Tucker. When we read him we laugh because he taps into our own vices; when we watch his movie we only see a shoddy trio of bros jabbing penis punchline after penis punchline.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell stars Matt Czuchry as Tucker (his first lead role; he has played a recurring character on everything from Friday Night Lights to Gilmore Girls), one of the movie's few respectable actors, who manages to wear only a white T-shirt and jeans for the entire movie. At the crux of the movie, Tucker connives his way into convincing his two best buds Drew (played by Jess Bradford of Swimfan fame) and Dan (played by George Stults of Seventh Heaven) to trek to a distant strip club with looser-than-normal strippers for Dan's bachelor party. Along the journey, they encounter a midget stripper, a single-parent stripper who stirs chemistry with Drew, and of course, laxatives. As the trio trots from dive bar to strip club, the film begins to look like the creators went into a joke shop to pluck props and plot lines. Granted, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell has its moments of pure gag humor: the midget stripper love scene, the tail-end of the laxatives in a hotel lobby. But when compared to the other bachelor-party saga this year, The Hangover - one of the most consistently funny and inventive comedies in film history - I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell falls flat into its own puddle of muck.
Poor timing with other movie releases, half-assed plotlines, and unoriginal, Natty-Ice inspired punchlines; I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell drones through. Ultimately, however, it's the expansiveness of the book itself that made a film version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell a virtual impossibility. Tucker's collection of tales reads as a gritty, uproarious American saga, while the movie tepidly slaps together three disjointed tales. In book format, the seemingly random array of stories only enhances the experience. In the film, it merely reveals the ridiculousness of trying to convert the book to film. D+
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