Swiss Army Man is a hard to appreciate movie if you are not in the proper mood for it. It is full of gross humor as it is full of mindfuck moments. It seems simple at first and gets multilayered later on. It starts as a comedy and changes into a drama.
If you go in completely blind, and you are not in a mood to watch something completely retarded, chances are you will walk out after 15 minutes. The premise is essentially the dumb version of “Cast Away”, which is hardly enough to excuse its existence as a parody of it. The only actual hook the film has is watching the actor who played Harry Potter being ridiculed in a hundred different and disgusting ways. Seriously, unless you seek some sadistic pleasure out of watching that stupid wizard and his overrated books getting some weird G-mod treatment by getting tossed around like a rug doll, you won’t be laughing. You will be cringing.
And boy, are there lots of cringe moments in this movie. It goes for all the low blows by having fart jokes, puke joke, erection jokes, poop jokes, and so much more. Half the time it’s like a bottom tier slapstick comedy you watch once and forget the following day.
The other half of the movie though tries to excuse it as part of the deranged mentality of the protagonist. He is a loser with nothing good going on in his life, thus all the ridiculous things that happen to him are part of his characterization. If they were not that extreme and lame, you wouldn’t understand his mental suffering. So basically, you should be viewing all the mindfuck moments as the delusions of a mentally unstable person. You know, like a Japanese chuuni, who constantly makes up stories so he can cope with his social anxiety.
And here is where the movie suffers from a major tonal whiplash. On one hand the gross aspect is excused as a mental projection of how he feels. On the other hand, many of the things Manny Potter is doing cannot be excused as delusions. They actually happen in real life and makes it very hard to appreciate the psychosis of the protagonist. It’s something like “Weekend at Berie’s” where the corpse part is actually happening and the audience knows it can’t be taken seriously regardless of the characters not seeing it in-story.
But then the movie wants you to take it seriously towards the end without taking out the ridiculousness. You are just standing there, confused, wondering how you are supposed to react to something like this. It ends in a much more satisfactory way than it begins but not by changing into a completely different genre. It’s more like a second genre mixing in and there is not much transition between the two styles, so you don’t know how you are supposed to react.
It could have been so much better if it wasn’t as gross at first, or if it was stripping away all supernatural aspects in the last act. Yet even with those issues, it is way better than a mindless goofball comedy, and you at least get to see a cork plugging Harry Potter’s ass from farting so hard, he turns into a freaking jet-ski.
