The feature debut from director Talmage Cooley - who by all accounts garnered great acclaim with an engaging documentary short about blind teenagers in a Buffalo ghetto - this terribly incoherent genre splicer is as badly thought out an idea as you will ever see on screen if you live to be a thousand. Purportedly a romantic comedy with a social message, it's painfully unfunny, incredibly patronizing, borderline misogynistic, and after boring you into a coma for the better part of two hours, gives up on its numerous flailing plot strands and freely admits via a final reel voiceover to not really being about anything at all.
Set in some random, economically depressed, Midwestern berg named Patriotville, geeky twenty-something Chase diligently curates the town's one-room historical museum, commemorating it as the site of some forgotten Civil War skirmish. Mostly this serves simply as an excuse to have him bike about town dressed ridiculously as a 18th century colonial. After a happenstance encounter with Lucy (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a local beauty who has some frankly creepy daddy issues, and is a bit damaged, and a bit idiosyncratic in that way indie rom-com girls always are, a fledgling romance just begins out of nothing.
With the town's scheming mayor, the impossibly named Cleveland Fishback (Rob Corddry, in yet another over-the-top cartoon performance), ready to sign away their collective souls to Indians in exchange for a casino, Chase and Lucy vow to stop him. It's a simple enough idea, and yet writer Anne Nocenti's debut script seems incapable of joining the dots from A to B, leaving gaping holes of logic the size of Jupiter that the movie just careens into on its way to oblivion. To play Devil's advocate for a second, Mayor Fishback isn't doing any of this for a personal kickback, he's doing it because the town will go bankrupt otherwise. By contrast, Chase's solution, which Nocenti offers up as the correct one, is simply to embrace the town's rich history. But to what end financially?
Chase's heart might be in the right place, but he has all the practical, economic sense of a brain damaged Underpants Gnome. This is nothing of course compared to the irony of "embracing history" by telling the Indians to stick it up their ass. The townsfolk, unsurprisingly, are simply the culmination of the very worst in red state clichés, bumbling around in baseball caps, grumbling in hick-speak. Cooley must be apportioned his fair share of blame. In keeping with his documentary background he apparently only knows two camera set-ups, medium shot and close-up. But the problems all stem from the apocalyptically bad script, which throws up jarring subplots at a whim only to completely ignore them going forward.
Chase is allegedly the hero we're meant to get behind, but he's constantly presented as a dork, while women in the film are either scorned harpies or lost little girls, and the history we're told we should all throw our arms around is consistently undermined for the sake of increasingly cheap comedy. Then as a final slap in the face to anyone who has actually made it through to the end, the film throws it's hands up and confesses that there isn't really a point, or a message, and that this is all just a collection of random stuff that happened, much like real life is, and wouldn't we agree? No! No, we wouldn't.
DVD Bonus Features
None whatsoever.
"Taking Chances" is on sale November 24, 2009 and is rated R. Comedy, Indie, Romance. Directed by Talmage Cooley. Written by Annie Nocenti. Starring Eamonn Walker, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Justin Long, Missi Pyle, Rob Corddry.
