Reviewed by Aaron Haynes

This is a beast of a movie to review, because while it's undisputedly one of the best plotted and acted stories in the history of 3D Movie Maker, it's also one of the worst directed and animated movies. How much slack can you give the ultra-crude visuals and worthless camera angles before they start to affect the experience as a whole? How seriously can you take the story when the crying man asks for a napkin and receives a giant white sphere, which he promptly smothers his face into (Look, ma! No hands!)? I wish I could say I've seen worse animation and scenery from big-name directors, but that wouldn't be as much of an issue if this didn't have such a serious, well-scripted, labyrinthine plot.

Let me start off by saying that this was the first Jeff Ching movie I've ever seen, so even though I'd frequently heard about his trademark humor and legendary bad scenery and animation, I wasn't sure what exactly to expect and wasn't keen on cutting the movie any slack for what I'd heard. And I'm mystified by the idea that they should be excused because "Hey, it's a Jeff Ching movie!" If reviewers can bash competent if not quite spectacular newbie attempts, but consider Jeff's films a sacred cow simply because he has a history of bad animation and direction, well, where's the impartiality in that? If a newbie had made this scenery, there would have been torrents of abuse spanning multiple threads.

But damned if I wasn't slowly won over by Jeff's writing. At the beginning of the film, we're introduced to Robert Domkey, a man who's being laid off after working at his boss's company for twenty years. The boss is already frustrated at hearing the same complaints nine times already from the employees he'd called in before, so he casually dismisses Rob's arguments and starts making fun of him. Something snaps -- Rob assaults him, flees, and kidnaps a boy named Ramu, who is taking his driver's license test, which his dad had bribed the DMV for him to fail. Several other plot threads are introduced, all of people having severe problems in their lives; while at first these seem unrelated, the way each of these characters interact and how it's all tied together near the end of the second part is pretty impressive, and very entertaining to watch. There's a lot inspired here by Snatch (and Magnolia, I'm told, which I haven't seen), in the way several unrelated characters are finally drawn together in a series of improbable coincidences (though the ricocheting bullet fulfilled the 'improbable' part of it for me in spades).

The second half of the movie is confined to one setting for the most part, and surprisingly it's here where Jeff's handle on the story seems strongest. The character development is compelling and interesting, and you get the impression that it's not simply a therapy session where dynamic characters are turned into static ones when they resolve their problems; it happens slowly, for some characters faster than others, and for some barely if at all. These are actually different personalities clashing and conflicting with each other, taking sides and causing (or solving) problems. The way Rob is able to recognize everyone's errors in judgment (as well as his own) when they've all been gathered together adds a fantastic dynamic to the story -- it turns out the title really does mean something after all. And the way everything ties together at the end is masterful. No matter what else I have to say about the film as a whole, the final scene with Jaymond's monologue will be considered one of the top defining moments in 3DMM history if there's any justice in this world.

But back to the film, which I still have problems with. All of this great plotting and acting takes place inside and around some of the sloppiest scenery, animation, and direction work I've ever seen. It seems to me that 2.9 of the three years it took to complete this movie went into the script and voice acting, and about a month or two of casual scene construction and animating went into the .3mm file. Camera angles are almost always horizontal, dialogue scenes have an annoying tendency to sit still and use the same back and forth talking action for minutes at a time, and there's simply nothing compelling to look at on the screen. And some parts of the movie practically scream "DIRECT ME", like when the Frank character is sitting on the bridge; some closeups or zooming shots of his face, or feet dangling over the edge of the bridge, to add more weight to the situation and give us a better glimpse of his mind.

I don't mean to bash, but this movie really frustrated me. The story was fantastic, the direction was abominable. At the end, I think the 3dmm community is better with this 'draft' movie than with no movie at all, and it deserves the recognition it gets for its achievement in script and voice acting. But if someone's going to remake a Jeff Ching movie in the near future, this has my wholehearted nomination.

Critical Score: 65/100
Personal Score: 70/100