Douchebag

City Paper Grade: B-

by Sam Adams

Saddled with the least appealing title this side of Hope Floats, Drake Doremus' discomfiting road movie at least makes good on its promise. Sam (Andrew Dickler) is a d-bag indeed, a smarmy, self-righteous hippie who only acts like an idealist so he can run down others for not living up to his standards. Steph (Marguerite Moreau), his soon-to-be bride, has bought into the act, as have we, at first. But when Steph grows curious about his estranged brother, his true douchiness starts to emerge.

Tom (Ben York Jones) is planning to skip the wedding altogether, claiming he's too strapped to travel, but Steph innocently hops in her car and picks him up, fostering an unhappy reunion. "I'm not psyched you're here," Sam tells him as soon as Steph's out of earshot. At first blush, Tom seems like the fuck-up of the pair, a single, unemployed artist who's still sponging off his parents. But as Sam concocts a harebrained (and none-too-credible) scheme to reunite Tom with his long-lost fifth-grade love, it becomes clear that Tom isn't the only one with thoughts of skipping the wedding.

Doremus ably sketches the outlines of long-simmering fraternal strife, and Dickler and Jones fill in their characters where the script leaves them blank. But there's not much to Douchebag beyond the internecine sniping, and Doremus' haphazard shooting style adds nothing. The movie observes the brothers from a distance, occasionally pushing them into situations that feel forced no matter how small. It's a canard of drama that action reveals character, but in Douchebag all it does is kill time. Not much of it, either — the movie runs barely an hour and 10 minutes. That's all the material requires, but they could have used a lot more material.