FRANKIE GO BOOM – The Blu Review

Did you have that mean older brother that made your childhood Hell with obnoxious pranks and bullying? Imagine if that sibling as an adult videotaped you in a sex act where you couldn’t quit ‘perform’ and posted it online for all the world to see. That’s the hilarious premise of FRANKIE GO BOOM, a raunchy comedy about brothers, families, alcoholic porn stars, a domestic pig, and Ron Perlman in drag.

FRANKIE GO BOOM opens with a home video from someone’s suburban childhood, as young Bruce tricks his little brother Frankie into falling into a pit. Their mother rushes out in her bathrobe screaming with her boobs popping out. Jump ahead twenty years and Frankie’s (Charlie Hunnam) brother Bruce (Chris O’Dowd) has just got out of prison and is back in his life, something Frankie is not too happy about. His whole life Bruce has been filming Frankie in the most embarrassing possible situations, including his disastrous wedding. When Frankie fails to sexually satisfy a woman named Lassie (Lizzy Caplan) he just met, his brother films that too. This simple act (or lack thereof) spirals out of control and ends up affecting everyone involved including Lassie’s porn star dad (Chris Noth) who Bruce met in rehab. What follows is Frankie’s frantic quest to retrieve the video before Lassie and her father find out, including hiring a transsexual computer hacker (Ron Perlman) to remove the non-sex tape from the Internet, where it has become a viral hit.

FRANKIE GO BOOM has a lot going for it. The film looks great, from the barren desert where Frankie lives in his hermit’s trailer, to the busy quiet of the streetlit L.A. night. The performances are fine especially Perlman, funny as a cigar-smoking, toenail-painting moose in a dress, though a weak link is Lizzy Caplan who shrieks her lines and rolls her eyes. The problem with the film is its script, which is little more than a series of naughty setups with no real punchlines. Writer/director Jordan Roberts merely presents this bawdy material without giving it much wit or comic spin, ending up with a series of cheap, easy jokes and sequences that smack of lazy screenwriting. Being raunchy isn’t enough if there aren’t laughs to back it up.

As one would expect with a modern studio film from Universal, the Blu-ray looks great, featuring no source blemishes and oodles of detail under a Red One camera shimmer. The audio is outstanding with the film’s dialogue balanced nicely in the mix.

Extras:
Deleted and Alternate Scenes: 11 minutes of six deleted scenes among them Frankie reacting to the sight of a man’s vagina, an alternate version of Chris Noth’s treadmill scene; two versions of a late-movie phone call, a weird scene featuring Frankie’s mom (Nora Dunn) turning into Satan, and an alternate ending.

Behind the Scenes: an 8-minute making-of featurette that mostly features the actors trying to convince us that they thought the script was really funny the first time they read it

Pig in the Pool: This brief 90-second piece shows the actual pig used in the movie and the fake one used for a scene of it catapulting through the air.