'Swiss Army Man' - Movie Review

Stars Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe - one of my least favourite young stars and one of my favourites, respectively. Dano inevitably plays whiny and wimpy characters, and I'm not even convinced he plays them well. While Radcliffe came off the massive fame of the Harry Potter series and decided that he was going to actually learn his trade - and to that end has been doing a wide variety of roles in some fairly weird films ("Horns" in particular comes to mind - not a good movie, but Radcliffe did a fine job).

Dano is playing his usual role - he's Hank Thompson, a weak-willed fool, stranded on a tiny island in the Pacific and bored to the point of suicide. His suicide is aborted by the appearance on the shore of a farting corpse ... played by Radcliffe. That this is a speaking role for Radcliffe will take some explanation, but let's start with the fact that the corpse can travel at high speed through the water by farting, and Dano rides him to a much larger body of land. It only gets more surreal from there.

Unfortunately, the underlying intent of the movie is fairly clear: the childlike innocence of the corpse is used to put Dano's life (and/or the fantasy life he likes to pretend he had) into perspective, and force him to reconsider how he acts.

Weird and pathetic, it mostly carries through on its bizarre premise. But you could also argue it's the world's most extended fart joke, and I didn't enjoy it much more than that.