REVIEW: Let’s Kill Ward’s Wife (2014)

Runtime: 82 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: A totally botched attempt to mimic the Coens’ style, really bad movie

I’m not going to call this the worst movie of 2014.  For that another movie filled that role, The Bunker (2014), which in fact was categorically the worst film I’ve ever witnessed and the only film I’ve ever given 0/10.  I seriously wonder if there’ll ever be a second.  I’m sorry to talk about that movie again in a different review, but the trauma still gets to me.  Anyway, this is the second worst movie of 2014.  Sometimes you wonder how something so bad gets the go ahead.

The premise is good – a bunch of guys are sick of one of their friends being abused by his piece of shit wife, so they plot to kill her and relieve him of his burden.  That’s a bold outline for a movie and it’s generally going to fall into two categories, highly successful and buttressed with a large online P.R. campaign, or complete disaster.  Guess which one this falls under?  A topic like this, with blatant murder as the subject of throway humor, needs to be handled with finesse and insight at the writing stage.  The Coens could’ve done this.  Writer/director Scott Foley clearly can’t.  It’s stuck between slapstick and the tv series ‘Friends’.

The actors don’t know what’s happening either.  Again Scott Foley’s fault.  Only Patrick Wilson ‘gets’ it, that it should be black comedic tongue-in-cheek in vein of Fargo.  But then he’s got a hard time making the best out of piss jokes and standing by as women talk ‘ironically’ about their hair.

There are going to be no spoilers here, they kill an annoying woman then dispose of the body, with not a solitary laugh in 81 minutes.  There is no punchline and there are no jokes.  And that’s a pity because the name of the movie and the trailer suggested a good one for manly men – finally ridding the air of some nagging bitch.  But even then they chickened out and made sure there were token female characters in on the act.

Not subtle enough to be intelligent, not bold enough to be hilarious, it’s hard to describe just how crap this movie is.  Watch Fargo, the TV series, instead.