Tusk
Tusk is really, really, really dumb.
No review of Tusk would be complete without a thesaurus’ worth of synonyms for the word dumb. Tusk is stupid, lamebrained, boneheaded, simple, senseless, doltish, half-witted, unsmart, dense, thick, lunkheaded and, above all else, really, really, really dumb.
Writer/director/podcaster/armchair provocateur Kevin Smith (Red State) has crafted a movie from what feels like a terrible joke made during a terrible hangover. Get this: Justin Long (The Lookalike) gets turned into a walrus. No, really, a walrus. Yes, with tusks and everything.
Also, all of this happens in Canada, because Canada’s like America but cheaper to film in and with funnier accents. Some mad Canadian a—— (Michael Parks, We Are What We Are) invites Long over on the pretense of telling him some stories. Long then wakes up to his legs missing and Parks telling him about his former walrus soul mate named Mr. Tusk (no, seriously).
I dunno, maybe Smith is trying to get revenge for all those “I’m a Mac” commercials Long did. I wouldn’t blame him.
To be fair, while Tusk is unquestionably idiotic, it really isn’t so much a single dumb movie as it is a tale of two dunce-cap-wearing movies.
On the one hand, you have a movie about a man turning into a walrus that’s so stupid it completes a 720-degree rotation — it’s so dumb that it’s good, then it’s so dumb that it’s dumb, then it’s so dumb that it’s good again before returning to being dumb again by the end.
The important thing to note is that, in between being so outrageously stupid that Forrest Gump could outperform it in class, parts of Tusk manage to entertain.
I don’t know what kind of a man dreams up a climactic fight sequence between a man surgically altered to be a walrus and a man wearing a walrus suit, but I’m glad he’s making movies instead of listening to the voices inside his head and becoming a serial killer.
On the other hand, you have an incredibly stupid movie about two idiots trying to find the now-walrus-man with the help of Quebecois Johnny Depp (Transcendence) in this year’s most embarrassing celebrity cameo.
For some baffling reason, Smith decides the best thing to punch up his walrus fable was having Depp pull one of the most painfully unfunny Quebecois accents in the history of comedy for long, interminable portions of the film.
Not only does it turn a movie about a man transforming into a walrus into a bad Saturday Night Live sketch, but Depp’s subplot in the film also ruins any semblance of narrative momentum as Tusk heads into its final walrus-on-man-walrus home stretch.
For all the fun moments to be had with Long in a grotesque walrus pose, Tusk never manages to justify its existence or excuse all of its numerous mistakes.
