‘The Machine’ Review: A Hard-Partying Comedian Pays for His Sins

The star of this image, Bert Kreischer, is a kind of common stand-up comedians who’s not zeitgeist-adjacent sufficient to generate a lot in the best way of suppose items or buzz. But within the late Nineties, as a scholar at Florida State University, he was the topic of a Rolling Stone journal profile that named him “the top partyer at the Number One Party School in the country.”

The late Nineties had been some time in the past, and right this moment Kreischer is a hefty 50-year-old who appears mildly partied out. That’s a part of his shtick — he performs stand-up whereas shirtless. In “The Machine,” he performs a fictionalized model of himself, initially in a penitent mode — a household man who’s royally ticked off his clan. At his daughter’s sixteenth party, Bert and his carpet salesman dad, Albert, are accosted, at gunpoint, by the mobster Irina (Iva Babic) and brought to Russia, the place Bert is to make amends for his half in a drunken practice theft many years earlier than.

This gore-steeped shaggy canine story is extrapolated from an precise Kreischer bit. As they dodge a rating of Slavic psycho killers who’re after an heirloom Bert stole, father and son hash out their points (after all).

You could marvel, if Kreischer is such a well-liked slapstick comedian, why he hasn’t executed extra tv and film appearing. Well. Here he hits his marks and stays in his persona lane, however he’s not a performer who can carry a film. Mark Hamill, as his dad, comes nearer to crusty-old-man territory than one may need predicted. He’s virtually Wilford Brimley.

The director Peter Atencio has gotten cheap ends in the absurdist meta-comedy realm (“Keanu,” as an example), however he can’t prepare dinner with these substances. Even when the relentlessly salty humor will get absolutely crass (a canine is thrown out a excessive window), the product is bland.

The Machine
Rated R for language, gore and excessive partying. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.