Skills Like This

Skills Like This

88 Minutes

I’m inclined to argue that Skills Like This is a sci-fi comedy, as its characters are simply that removed from reality as we know it. Like some feature-length sitcom attempting to integrate elements from Bottle Rocket, Office Space and Pulp Fiction but failing to utilize anything that made those films so memorable, Monty Miranda’s Skills Like This is just your average slacker comedy despite its attempts to liven things up with a modernized Robin Hood character.

Max Solomon (Spencer Berger) is the Robin Hood character you’re supposed to root for, a down on his luck writer who, after a disastrous performance of a play, subsequently decides to become a petty criminal instead. Spurred by a conversation by his idiotic, testosterone fueled friend Tommy (Brian D. Phalen) and the anal square David (Gabriel Tigerman), Max spontaneously robs the local bank. High off the success of his first robbery and the smaller heist that follows, Max and the respectively enthusiastic and paranoid Tommy and David proceed to hit the town and miraculously come across the teller who handed over the cash during the robbery. While she initially gives in to logic and promises to call the cops on Max, Lucy (Kerry Knuppe) soon falls for Max’s charms and invites him back to her apartment where, due to the magic of indie filmmaking, she falls in love with him by morning. It doesn’t take long for Lucy to realize that he may not be worth the trouble, though, seeing as how he’s little more than a large scale kleptomaniac and she prefers to, well, obey the law. Hilarity does not ensue.

Although the film bills itself a comedy, it constantly falls flat. During one of the film’s many pointless subplots, the viewer is treated to a joke that would be offensive if it weren’t so stupid; man-boy Tommy heads to a playground to make catcalls at nine year olds while a merely annoyed David watches in silence before one of the parents chases them off. The filmmakers hastily make it clear that the scene is just meant to drive home the fact that Tommy is little more than a “fully functioning seven year old” and just in case you didn’t get that, David utters that exact line less than a minute prior and then again afterward.

But every character in the film is arguably a fully functioning seven year old; Max takes up crime because he hasn’t become a widely hailed and respected writer by his mid-twenties, David is a whiney jackass who needs others to affirm his existence in order to feel good about himself and even Lucy is a self-absorbed “artiste” who simultaneously embraces and denies her need to have a stereotypical big, strong, mysterious man to make her life worth living. And somehow the audience is supposed to sympathize with these aimless characters despite that Max’s crimes, the crux of the plot, are always random and poorly thought out just like the script; he doesn’t bother with disguises, or avoiding witnesses or any of the things that a successful criminal planning to make a career out of robbery might consider.

Like the buffoons in Bottle Rocket Max just stumbles into things and claims luck as a skill. But where Bottle Rocket’s moronic protagonists had heart, and cared about each other in their own way, Max just has a knack for avoiding trouble and endangering all the people around him who are drooling over his newfound badass-ery. Bottle Rocket was a success because nothing about the characters was glamorous; they were not intended to be seen as latter-day highwaymen, just losers with nothing in their lives and all their criminal romanticism led to was tragedy and disaster. That firmly rooted sense of reality kept Bottle Rocket grounded, making it a severe, welcome juxtaposition to the flashy imitations of Tarantino that were so prevalent at the time.

As a result of failing to take note of Bottle Rocket’s lessons, every note of Skills Like This is out of tune, its characters little more than props meant to hold up a premise that even the WB would have canceled four episodes in. Like so many “quirky” little indie comedies, it confuses haphazard references to childhood nostalgia with “insight” and mistakenly believes that sub-Kevin Smith humor is what people are looking for in filmmaking rather than careful plotting, introspective character work, and a greater message about humanity than what a popcorn blockbuster can offer. Its similarly bland cinematography and intrusive indie-pop soundtrack further drown the film under its own bloated weight. With Skills Like This, director Monty Miranda has only further proven that as much as indie filmmakers like to believe theirs is a realm of strictly art, being outside of the mainstream does not in and of itself make you invulnerable to making worthless dreck.

by Morgan Davis