Home Fries

Tackling a black comedy, I suppose, is a filmmaker's way of declaring artistic fearlessness; on the evidence, it's also a convenient route to career suicide. Only a very few pictures ever achieve that necessary degree of edgy malevolence-far more often, genre efforts commit nihilistic overkill, sacrificing characterization to the wicked goings-on. So if nothing else-and, believe me, there ain't much else-the new Drew Barrymore vehicle Home Fries deserves credit for its conception as a (wannabe) dark comedy.

The credit ends there, though; despite a plot as naughty and knotty as any of its genre predecessors', this jarringly misconceived dud actually feels undercooked. After a fairly promising first scene, in which a middle-aged man stumbling through a cornfield is literally frightened to death by an ominous helicopter, Home Fries loses its bearings and melts into romantic piffle.

The helicopter's victim, you see, had impregnated Sally (Barrymore), a sweet young thing employed by the local Burger-Matic. (At this fine establishment, Sally mans the drive-thru counter so that customers won't detect her bulging abdomen-since the town appears to have a population of twelve, I wonder who Sally's trying to fool.) It seems the man's long-suffering wife (Catherine O'Hara, a long way from Waiting for Guffman) has caught wise and commissioned her two grown boys to dispatch with their philandering stepfather.

Through circumstances too complex (read: contrived) to explain, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum fear that Sally might implicate them in the murder, and so Dorian (Luke Wilson, 100% charm-free), at the behest of his psychotic brother Angus (grating Jake Busey), investigates our rather daft heroine. You'll never, ever believe which characters fall in love!!! What a piddling, homely little film this is.

Home Fries approaches its macabre plot twists with all the energy of a low-wattage romance, and its dialogue is just as flat: "I'm carrying your baby," Sally informs her soon-to-be-deceased lover, "and your wife doesn't know. You have to tell her." The characters might as well directly address the audience, since they clearly know they're in a movie.

Barrymore gives an amiable, slight performance; Wilson radiates all the charisma of a cinder block; poor O'Hara struggles valiantly in a role that randomly shifts from maternal to murderous, depending on the whims of screenwriter Vince Gilligan and director Dean Parisot (making his feature film debut, and, boy, does it show). The editing is inept; the cinematography, drab; the entire experience, damaging. Fittingly, my judgment of Home Fries is best expressed by a line from another dark comedy, the incalculably superior Get Shorty: "I've seen better film on teeth."

-By Dan Mallory