You Might As Well Live

Simon Ennis

BY Robert BellPublished Aug 27, 2009

With dildos strapped to faces, prosthetic penises, paedophilia jokes and an extended, vivid sequence of defecation, You Might As Well Live doesn't just step over the line of bad taste, it does a limbo under it with a beer in hand while a cold sore endowed hooker waits on the other side. And despite this deliberately irreverent zeal for political incorrectness and scatological humour, nothing comes across as particularly shocking, likely due to the abundance of raunchy imports from the U.S. There is enough of it, however, that inevitably a few jokes click, generating a couple laughs amongst the tedium.

Smartly presenting the material through the eyes of a kind-hearted but pathetic protagonist, You Might As Well Live follows Robert Mutt (Joshua Peace, who co-wrote the script) after he's kicked out of an insane asylum for being too happy and balanced. Immediately flagged as a pervert by the town paedo/clown (Steven McHattie), Robert tours around town on the down low with stoner pals Hershey and Cookie (Dov Tiefenbach and Kristen Hager), fantasizing about a washed-up baseball player (Michael Madsen) and flirting with psychotic bowling alley employees (Liane Balaban).

His goal is ultimately that of finding 25 dollars so that he can enter an air hockey tournament but along the way he falls in love with a motionless catatonic woman named Regina Manitoba (Nicole Arbour). It is this strict adherence to a compassionate core, with characters that genuinely care for each other, amongst extended sequences of full-frontal nudity, sex dungeons and tranny amour, that keeps the film grounded and affable, if leaden with occasional dead air.

With a brief running time, a message of personal balance in an insane world and occasionally inspired humour (such as the duct taping of a catatonic woman to a swing), You Might As Well Live delivers more than most Canadian comedies, which is at least something.
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