I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Late in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a film version of Tucker Max's inescapable diary/memoir, Tucker (Matt Czuchry) realizes that a laxative has been placed in his drink, and he races half-naked through a hotel lobby trying to find a restroom. As he frantically locates a venue to do his business, we see his liquid excrement soak through his boxers before he finally reaches a stall, filling up two separate toilet bowls and soaking the floor in human by-product. Like most of the film's big set pieces, this is based on an actual incident in the life of the real Tucker Max, but being confronted with the unfortunate sight of Matt Czuchry's smeary backside in unflinching close-up leads one to realize that there's a big difference between reading someone describe his lavatorial escapades and actually witnessing them. Even fans of Max's raunchy book (full disclosure: I am not one of them) would have to admit that this entire woeful film suffers from a fatal problem: Max's sexcapades are either mundane or flat-out unpleasant when not filtered through whatever storytelling flair the self-styled legend has in print. A Hangover-lite story of a bachelor party gone wrong, Max's creepy, sexist screenplay ("Come on, fat girls aren't real people") isn't helped by Czuchry's smarmily unlikeable lead performance. Contrived and unconvincing, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell at least has the distinction of claiming one of the most laughable "redemptive" endings of all time, featuring the most awkward wedding toast since Rachel Getting Married. The relentlessly self-promoting Max is surprisingly absent from the disc's special features, which are limited to some "Shocking and Outrageous" deleted scenes, and some unrelated trailers, including one for a decidedly less misogynistic film: Antichrist.