Last Call

Paolo Pilladi is a director who made a movie with very good actors using a story with lots of potential and a camera work which was quite good... so why the movie felt so flat? Almost like making a cocktail in The Bucket which does not taste well because something is missing, but I cannot pinpoint what!

I really liked the social impact of the story mixed up with the personal drama but all I could actually remember from watching it were the scenes where Irish guys live their dreams through wasted time of drunkenness!

The audience seems to be divided into two camps: Friends and family of the director and/or cast, who shamelessly give this "movie" a 10, and everyone else, most of whom begrudgingly give it a 1, because ZERO is not an option. Jeremy Piven should have taken Ari Gold's advice to Vincent and read the script before taking this gig. But maybe he couldn't, because THERE WAS NO SCRIPT. Just bad improvisation. His character sums it up perfectly near the end of this arduous slog: "The fish stinks from the head down." Everything about Last Call stunk. Originally titled, Crabs In A bucket, I think someone realized that the plot, such as it is, didn't really reflect a grasp of the metaphor. But changing the title was merely putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. What they really needed to do here was write a script. Cobbling together a collection of drunken montages punctuated by cringe-inducing ad-libbing and bad Irish accents is not comedy, it's painful. The actors, from Jeremy Piven on down seem completely lost in the absence of both written dialogue and direction. This would have been cheaper and much funnier to just point a camera inside a real life bar. And far less insulting to a viewing audience.

Stereotypes are true but to be avoided because they do not offer fresh perspectives, rather they present fixed views that coddle our expectations. Using the familiar return story, this movie exploits every stereotype it in almost every degree.

We have the cranky father, the old band of friends, the various women (this is mostly a male tale told from the male angle); economic hardship, career and ambition disappointments and many passing shots of houses and streets that would not grace a glossy lifestyle magazine.

Along with those tired contextual clichés we have the representation of working class men as horny, hard-drinking and unlikely to reach any form of maturity. They have scant lives besides benders and laughing drunkenly in their endless pursuit of male bonding. Such fixed and narrow representations of other social groups usually cause anger but perhaps this cohort are phlegmatic about such things.

To use a phrase, It is what it is, and if this story with its good intentions and able cast of actors seems worth the time, then so be it. Don't look for much above the prosaic.

I can't believe I spent money to watch this movie. I'm no movie critic, but this had to be the worst screenplay ever submitted to any movie studio! Who approved this?? Zero plot, zero character development, zero humor. Seriously, very unlikeable characters. Whoever is giving positive reviews has to be related to the so-called writer or director. Really bad movie.

As a former resident of Upper Darby and a UDHS graduate, I was very disappointed in this movie. If this group of characters typify current residents with no jobs, incessant drinking, and childish games while living in a seemingly run-down neighborhood, I'm happy to be a former resident. The plot was woefully under-developed and the dialogue was at times hard to follow. Manning's character at one time said that they'd been working to revitalize the neighborhood for years but the visuals showed no evidence of that which found me rooting for Piven's character's casino project. Like others, I would have preferred to see the movie shot in Upper Darby with actual locals like Bradley Cooper and Tina Fey starring. Heck, how can you do a movie about Upper Darby without a single shot of the 69th Street shopping area???