112 min | R | May 26, 2023 | Screen Gems
Bert Kreischer turns his most famous drunken bar story into a feature film. The Russian mafia he robbed on a college train trip across Russia shows up two decades later to collect, and they bring his estranged father along for the trip. The movie mistakes a five-minute anecdote for a plot.
The Machine adapts Bert Kreischer’s viral stand-up bit about robbing a train car during a college trip across Russia. Kreischer plays a sanded-down version of himself, a famous comedian whose whole career rests on that one drunken story. Two decades later the Russian mafia he wronged arrives at his suburban doorstep to collect. They drag Bert and his estranged father back to Russia for a reckoning. The film inflates a five-minute anecdote into a full action comedy, and the seams show in every scene. What it is really about is a comedian defending the single bit that made him, and the movie believes the bit is enough.
Kreischer plays Bert at one volume. He shouts, he sweats, he takes his shirt off, and the performance never modulates past the energy of a stand-up stage. Mark Hamill plays Albert, the estranged father, and attacks the role with a put-on accent and a gleeful contempt that supplies the only real comic timing on screen. Jimmy Tatro plays Young Bert in the flashbacks and gives the college sequences a loose charm the present-day scenes lack. Nikola Đuričko plays Igor and Iva Babić plays Idina as cartoon heavies the script never bothers to make threatening.
Peter Atencio directs after years of sketch work on Key & Peele, and the film plays like a sketch stretched past its breaking point. The script by Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes cuts between Bert’s drunken college trip and his middle-aged present, but the flashback structure exists to pad the film rather than to build anything. The action choreography is flat and the fights are cut so tight that the geography of each brawl disappears. Atencio shoots the Russian settings as generic gray interiors with no sense of place. The score leans on needle drops to manufacture momentum the staging cannot supply.
The Machine knows it is built on a thin premise and tries to cover the gap with volume. Every scene is louder than the last and none of them are funnier. The father-son material gestures at sentiment in the final act, but the film has not earned it. A good comedy would mine the absurdity of a man whose tall tale comes true. This one just films the tale and hopes the telling carries it.