Before anything can happen in Kevin Smith's latest film Tusk, there is laughter. Not from the audience, mind you, but from the screen. You see, Wallace (a mustachioed Justin Long) is a podcaster who travels around the country interviewing weird people in order to come home and describe their tales to his co-host Teddy (Haley Joel Osment. Yes, THAT Haley Joel Osment) who refuses to get on a plane and leave LA. They call their show 'The Not-See Party' because Teddy doesn't see what Wallace does. Do you get it? Wallace tells his story, Teddy laughs his ass off. Teddy makes some witty comment, Wallace takes a turn. Like most comedy podcasts it's 70% laughing, 30% actually talking. And for those first 30-45 minutes it truly felt like Smith might have been making a sharp, self-referential comment on what happens to people who treat everything like a never-ending joke.
During the opening credits, after the initial laughing, Tusk also lets the audience know that it's based on a true story. That is, a true story in so far as the fact that the film is actually based on one of Smith's own podcast episodes in which he and his friend and co-host Scott Mosier had some fun riffing on an online ad that was soliciting for someone willing to wear a walrus costume for two hours a day in exchange for a free room. In the film, Wallace encounters a similar situation after he flies to Manitoba to interview the subject of a particularly brutal and humiliating viral video. When Wallace discovers his subject has committed suicide, he finds himself desperate for someone, anyone to make his five-hundred dollar plane ticket worthwhile. He finds such a person while taking a piss at a local bar. Posted on a cork board is a handwritten want ad offering free room and board to anyone willing to listen to the author's copious maritime stories. The flyer is signed Howard Howe. Jumping on the opportunity immediately, Wallace drives the two hour drive to meet with Mr. Howe (played by Michael Parks) who, upon Wallace's arrival, serves him tea made with brandy-soaked leaves and spins elaborate yarns about meeting Ernest Hemingway, becoming shipwrecked and eventually finding a savior in an unlikely source - a walrus he affectionately named 'Mr. Tusk.' Before Wallace knows it he is knocked unconscious by the tea only to wake up with one of his legs removed. And while Mr. Howe tells him that it was caused by a brown recluse bite, Wallace quickly realizes what the audience knows immediately - Howard Howe is mutilating Wallace's body in order to fit him into a grotesquely constructed walrus suit - Wallace's removed and sharpened femurs serving as tusks.
Tusk has a lot of stuff going for it. For one, the aforementioned Michael Parks has the magnificent ability to transform Smith's often overly written dialogue into something more akin to a beautiful spoken word performance. And Smith is smart enough to realize it - allowing Parks' lengthy, twisting stories act as the base of the film. There is also the fact that the Mr. Tusk costume is genuinely horrifying (complete with bloody scars, patches of skin with different pigments and faces of Mr. Howe's past victims) and is more than successful in its attempts to make the audience believe Wallace is in a considerable amount of physical and emotional pain and distress while trapped within it. There is a particular scene with Mr. Howe demands that Wallace - like any good walrus - learn to swim that is staged as well as any scene from a horror movie I've seen in quite some time. Wallace's immense panic combined with the discovery he makes after being submerged is legitimately bone-chilling. And there are a few subtle touches of Smith's brand of humor that are especially well done. There is the fact that Wallace continually discovers important details while urinating. And there is the use of the Canadian Big Gulp (the 'Chug-eh-Lug'), which is present in one form or fashion in nearly every scene at Howe's mansion. It's an exceptionally clever visual that highlights just how out of place Wallace is in Mr. Howe's depraved world.
Unfortunately, the 'Chug-eh-lug' and the 'Eh-2-Zed' convenience store from which it comes are both symbolic of Kevin Smith's own tendencies to really Wallace all over everything and constantly go for the cheap joke. What Smith has promised to be the first in his 'True North Trilogy,' Tusk is packed full of weak, Canada-centric word play (including the fictional restaurant Pouteenie-Weenie). But where Smith goes truly overboard is with the film's most egregious, disgustingly awful performance - Johnny Depp as Guy Lapointe, a nearly special needs French-Canadian homicide detective who has been hunting Howe for decades and who vows to help Teddy and Ally (Wallace's girlfriend, played by Genesis Rodriguez) track him down. Between his thick makeup, ridiculous wig and mustache, laughable accent and constantly moving left eye, Depp as Guy Lapointe feels like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character from the 1950s or '60s who got transplanted into a horror movie just as it's beginning to become truly disturbing. It's unneeded comic relief that just keeps going and going and going and going. The tonal shifts that result are something from which Tusk never recovers.
It also doesn't help that the film really doesn't have much of a plot - apart from Wallace going to see Mr. Howe and getting all walrus'd up for his troubles - and doesn't feel thought out or focused in the least, even for a low(er)-budget movie. There are weird subplots that go nowhere, random flashbacks for some of Wallace's and Mr. Howe's ramblings but not others, illogical character behaviors, no real character to connect with, the list goes on and on. At points during the first 30-45 minutes it seems like Kevin Smith is honestly trying to tell a story about two very different storytellers - the vulgar, unpalatable Wallace's and the courteous, mannered Howard Howe - who both exploit their audiences for their own sick, perverted aims. It would have been fascinating to see what would have happened had he decided to focus only on the relationship between Wallace and Howe (and Wallace's ultimate transformation). But Smith's inability to allow his own story to breath - needing to script every laugh and compliment himself on how good that last joke was - is what kills it. And while there may be something to admire in the sheer audacity it takes to make a film like Tusk, instead of a pitch black, pointed and ironic commentary, we get what ends up being an unfunny, tonally schizophrenic nothing of a movie that shows its cards far too early and becomes something totally unexpected in the worst possible way.
I don't really know how to end this, so I'll leave you when an excerpt from a poem written by another storyteller with a similar subject:
"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"
3.5 out of 10
