Movie Review of a Film I Absolutely and Regrettably Did See in its Entirety : 8 Million Ways to Die

Holy hell this movie sucks. But I watched all of it. Let me tell you the two main reasons why I watched this entire film.

1.) Pre-test anxiety demanding useless distraction.

2.) IFC channel airing films without commercials.

IFC channel knows exactly what it is doing. They have a group of scientists who determined that if you show anything without interruption people like me will watch it. Oh, and watch it I did. Let's summarize: Jeff Bridges is a cop who drinks himself out of a job and marriage after shooting a perp in the heat of the moment of a bust gone wrong. Through unexplainable plot contrivances, he ends up befriending a hooker who gets killed, then befriending the dead hooker's hooker friend, "played" by Rosanna Arquette. Living hooker friend is the kept woman of local crime boss Andy Garcia, who in this film is years away from anything resembling an actor. Jeff Bridges somehow feels indebted to the dead hooker who he did not bang or know for more than 20 hours or even meet until the day she was killed, so he starts to dig around. IT'S JUST HIS ALKIE EX-COP INSTINCTS, ROOKIE. He is at first rebuffed by Rosanna Arquette, whose character was masterfully created to advance the plot with timely tear-stained confessional breakdowns and to fuck Jeff Bridges while 80's synth beats pour out of the background noise. At one point, when JBPD is about to fall off the wagon in grand fashion (I was rooting for this in a Crazy Heart-induced fever) she actually stops him from doing so by offering herself instead. Later in this shitty movie Andy Garcia makes idle threats and relies on gel and "wide-eyed intensity" to convey his character's nonexistent motivations. Andy Garcia's sole preparation for this role was to watch Scarface twice. The movie ends with an awful standoff in a warehouse where at any point anyone involved could have gotten the drop on any other person but chooses not to so they can spew terrible dialogue about how they have nothing to lose. Somehow nearly twenty minutes later the movie ends and you somehow know less about the characters than before they were introduced.

However, this is all excusable except for the following: the movie title makes no sense at all. If pressed, I would say the movie presents about 25 ways to die. The other 7,999,975 ways to die are not even hinted at. Only about a dozen people die in this film anyway...what kind of a bodycount is that for a film touting millions of potential deaths in its title? 8 Million Ways to Die would have been an apt title for Braveheart and Braveheart alone. At least there were thousands of dead men in that film. I bet Rosanna Arquette doesn't even bag her own groceries.