Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘Crimes Against Humanity’

Boy let me tell you. Film festivals are tricky to program. Well over 100 movies in a ten day span, including both short films and features? That’s a lot of movies. And there really is no way possible for each movie to be a winner. Some of them aren’t going to be so hot, for various reasons. But they’ll have redeeming qualities about them, variables that make them worthwhile in one way, shape or form. Unfortunately I don’t think “Crimes Against Humanity” meets even that criteria.

So this chick Brownie is having a bad week. Her pet bunny dies, her live-in boyfriend is kind of a dick about her being unemployed (though she does seem to be slackin’), she gets struck my lightning, hit by a car, it’s just rough all around for poor old Brownie. Even when she finds some other guy who seems caring and understanding, he really just turns out to be an uncaring dick like everyone else. So Brownie is having a bad spell for sure.

Meanwhile, we get to spend A LOT of time with her boyfriend Lewis, who is just obnoxious most of the time and manages to be a mostly uninteresting character. When he’s not talking down to his girlfriend who is MUCH too good looking and sweet for him (even if she is an unmotivated possible manic depressive), he is working as a dean’s assistant at a college, and for some reason that isn’t made entirely clear, some sort of investigation got launched into some of the school’s weirder professors for possible satanist ties and stuff like that, and it is possible (though nowhere near probable) that one of the professors placed some sort of hex on Lewis through the use of some sort of berry grim dirt mixture or whatever, so bad things happen not to him but to the women he sleeps with, or so he thinks, but it doesn’t make sense cause bad shit was happening to Brownie before the possible hex thing but whatever none of that matters.

What matters is that we follow around Lewis, he doesn’t do much except have sex with women who are, again, FAR too good looking for him, and he hangs out with seemingly the world’s worst private investigator, and together they accomplish absolutely nothing. Lewis works the investigation of the weird school teachers but it goes absolutely nowhere and then that’s that. He really doesn’t do a damn thing. Also, I got the definite feeling that the fella playing Lewis was doing a Michael Cera impression the whole time, going for that charming awkward delivery and really it is just not good. There’s a reason why Michael Cera is Michael Cera and this guy is who he is, know what I mean? It was just a distracting and silly choice.

Meanwhile, no one does ANYTHING in this movie. Brownie manages to get a job interview by the end of the story, but we get to see how horrible that goes anyway for her so she’s probably going to go back to bed and lay there for days in a depressed funk like she did for pretty much 95% of the movie. Lewis did nothing except get drunk at a fundraiser, be a dick to people, get laid, and just generally act shitty. The “investigation” of the professors goes NOWHERE. When the movie is over, there is no understanding of why the bad things are happening to Brownie, even though that’s mostly what this story is about, Lewis is a frustrating and annoying character that did not grow or change from beginning to end, and quite frankly, the movie just didn’t make any damned sense.

I mean, really, it made NO sense. Things did not happen for any reasons, they just happened randomly because the script deemed it so (e.g. the lightning strike, getting hit by the car, Lewis getting laid), hell there were even scenes inserted in there that seemed like they were out of entirely different movies, like when the world’s worst private investigator, driving home drunk as a skunk, gets pulled over by the world’s worst police officer, and the officer forces the PI to have some sort of improvisational scene with him, and it is so fucking annoying because it just does not matter at all. Nothing that happens in this movie matters or has any value or consequence or anything.

What is this movie saying? Life sucks? No shit. Grab a ticket and get in line. “Crimes Against Humanity?” Playing this movie to audiences is a crime against humanity, a felonious act of first degree premeditated murder of time and energy. This is a downright poorly written, stiffly acted, cheap, unimaginative, and mostly unfunny dark comedy, with all the attributes of just the worst film festival type of movies.