Big Gold Brick

Writer-director Brian Petsos gets one thing right in this preposterous waste of time: You need to have a concussion to understand it. Touted as "genre bending," Big Gold Brick seems not to adhere to the standards of typical genres simply because it's not well-written. It's as if Petsos had writer's block, pushed through it by writing anything, and never went back to fix the script. In fact, it may be the first film where the plot is driven by a continuous stream of deus ex machina.

While there's something of a positive message to be found amid the mess, the disappointing life lesson to young aspiring filmmakers is that it's not about the quality of your work, it's who you know. Petsos and producer/co-star Oscar Isaac appear to be best buds (they've been making shorts together for years). And it's easy to see why Isaac would relish his role here: He plays an over-the-top Bond-type villain with such delicious creativity that Mike Myers' Dr. Evil might be taking notes. Meanwhile, executive producer Kristen Wiig is an ex-girlfriend Petsos has known since high school -- the duo worked on the SNL movie spin-off MacGruber together. Frankly, this entire film makes more sense if you look at the characters through the lens of Wiig's SNL background: Most of them have no more depth than her popular Target Lady. The effort might have worked better had all the actors played their roles with similar absurdity, as seen in movies like Zoolander and Anchorman. As it stands, Andy Garcia delivers a textured performance, Megan Fox leans into typecasting, Isaac's villain seems like an audition for the next Spy Kids, Cohen performs like he's doing drama in a high school sketch comedy production, and Lucy Hale is just there. Creating original comedy is hard and requires taking risks. Big Gold Brick's real discovery is that the famous and well-connected can fail at it too.