Review: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Tucker Max’s trick is pretty neat, and it has served him well. He’s built an empire out of a website, turning that into a best-selling book that’s been adapted into a feature film. He’s done it by being good at what he does, of course, which is to court offense by inviting angry, pissed-off, irritated attacks on his “true life” adventures of outlandish sexual conquests (dwarves and blind women!!) and outrageous white-boy teenage “I call myself an asshole all the time, so that’s why I can call women bitches” anti-“pc” faux-transgression.

With one hand, he draws in the opprobrium – his character in the film version of his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell says “Fat women aren’t real people” – and with the other deftly (were he 12 years old, I guess) undercuts that courted criticism by wearing it on his chest. His character, his persona, is that of the unrepentant, incorrigible foul-mouthed rascal, the martyr for the cause of muzzled bros everywhere, the one man willing to withstand the slings and arrows or outrage thundered down upon a simple rich white student brave enough to speak the truth of womanhood: they’re slutty ass hoes and it’s probably o.k. to date rape them in certain contexts. The predictable, perfectly on-the-nose criticism levied against Tucker Max is then used by Tucker Max in his texts – shrewish women are offended at his misogyny in his film and the back cover of his book features not quotations of critical acclaim but instead angry letters from pissed off women (can you believe he did that!? How crazy wild is this dude!} - as a method of diminishing the power of criticism aimed at him and his work. It’s smart, and it has served him well with the legion of sexually frustrated teen dudes that love his work.

The problem though, at least with the film, is that it’s just painfully not funny, like at all, and not in a “it’s not funny to call women bitches” way but in a “I heard all these jokes five years ago” way. In a watching bad actors chew up a horrible script way. It's way more boring than it is offensive. It fails, it stinks, it's awful. It’s tedious and just about the most amateurish pile of shit I’ve ever seen. Some of the joke highlights: we learn about the porn star name game! That’s where you take your mother’s maiden name and add the street you grew up on, and it was emailed to you in 2004 by your uncle. For more topical humour, there’s a joke about Magic Johnson having AIDS. One character is sarcastic and stand-offish, “prickly” if you will, and we know this because after he approaches a woman at a bar, he tells her to “get away from me before I carve another fuck-hole in your torso”. He’s upset because she likes a rapper named “Grillionaire”. The film is vile and sexist and offensive, and coldly calculated to be so with the same fore-thought that went into making Up! cute and heart-touching. That’s not the point. Vileness and sexism can be funny, can often be worth watching. I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is neither. It’s horrible, a cack-handed ugly dud pretending at being a real film, and any parents worried that their sons will be twisted by Max’s perverted view of the world should instead be worried that their kid’s going to have twelve bucks yoinked out of his Maxim magazine fund to waste on a bunch of ancient creaky jokes told by charmless, guileless idiots. 1.6/10