The Onion Movie

A few years ago, I was having a sleepless night. Rather than try to fight it, I went into my living room, grabbed a snack, and started flipping through channels. When I got to C-SPAN 2 (the least-watched channel at 4 a.m.), something caught my eye: an interview with a handful of the editors of The Onion. The Onion had been my favorite satirical news website for a few years at that point, so I stopped to watch. Of all that was said that early morning, one thing stuck with me. One of the editors (I forget who), was asked a question about some of The Onion's articles being in bad taste. He answered by saying something like: "I think there's such thing as good taste in bad taste."

That summed up The Onion perfectly for me: Sure, they'd print outrageous and inflammatory headlines (example: a picture of a janitor with the caption "Mexicans Sweeping the Nation"), but they were always irrepressibly clever or so well honed on the idiosyncrasies of our modern life that they made you double back and wonder what, really, should have been offending you in the first place.

That impossibly long intro (I'm sorry) brings me to The Onion Movie, which seems closer to "bad taste" than it is to "good taste in bad taste." The Onion Movie is primarily a series of seemingly unrelated skits, interspersed with an anchor reading random news headlines -- headlines that will seem very familiar to Onion aficionados ("8-Year-Old Accidentally Exercises Second-Amendment Rights", "Georgia Adds Swastika, Middle Finger to State Flag").

Some of the new material includes: Steven Seagal (really!) as the big-budget action hero Cockpuncher, a sultry teen singer who earnestly proclaims the innocent intentions of songs like "Take Me From Behind," and a subtle twist on a normal suburban evening when murder mystery game is replaced by a rape mystery game.

If you watched just a short glimpse, you couldn't be sure you weren't watching an example of the infernal pox that is the _____ Movies (fill in the blank with "Date" or "Epic" or "Not Another Teen"). The jokes, in general, are fairly lowest common denominator. But The Onion Movie never really tips its hand as to whether it's revelling in lampooning these easy targets or lampooning those who would lampoon. (Which, I suppose, includes themselves.) In one of the its best bits, The Onion Movie breaks from itself to get commentary from a panel of distinguished film critics, one of whom decries the film's pandering to the masses. The panel host then introduces the next commenter: The Masses (played by a frat boy wearing a "Beer F***ing Rules" shirt). "The Masses" talks about how gay the critics are and how awesome the Cockpuncher bits were, and then the movie resumes where it left off.

These brief flashes of self-awareness -- and the occassionally hilarious one-liners, such as the man who overcomes adversity to become the world's first comatose diver -- make it hard to get a real handle (a.k.a. rating) on this film. In the end, though, the pass-it-on factor seems the most fitting. With the best moments of the print version of The Onion, I eagerly pass on headlines, articles, and man-on-the-street interviews to my friends (whether they want to hear them or not). With The Onion Movie, I really wouldn't be bothered if not a single other living soul watched it. Moments of hilarity notwithstanding, that can't afford The Onion Movie any more than a -6.