Directed by Dan Eckman
At The Quad
Runtime: 106 min.
A group of men still clinging to their immaturity in a movie that’s too long by half an hour? No, it’s not a new Judd Apatow flick, it’s The Mystery Team, an intermittently funny movie from the comedy team DERRICK.
Transplanting boy detectives like Encyclopedia Brown into the bodies of high school seniors in 2009 is a clever (and amusingly mean-spirited) premise to hang a feature film on. There’s something insufferable about all those children solving absurd mysteries, a truth we learned all over again when Hollywood turned Nancy Drew into a tween for that particular film travesty, which is only heightened when the detectives are 18-year-olds who still slurp chocolate milk and think girls are gross.
But watching Jason (Donald Glover), Charlie (Dominic Dierkes) and Duncan (DC Pierson) flounder after a little girl hires them to uncover who killed her parents grows increasingly bothersome. The trio of actors are all shamelessly committed to the material, even as the jokes become so disgusting that even thinking about them now makes me gag a little (a major plot point involves a diamond ring, a stripper’s vagina and an overflowing toilet), but as the plot grows increasingly Byzantine, the one-liners and fish-out-of-water antics simply pile up to little effect.
As a movie, The Mystery Team feels like an overly extended rubber band, just waiting to snap back into its proper shape: a YouTube short. But as a showcase for Hollywood’s up-and-comers, it’s marvelous (both Glover and Aubrey Plaza, as Jason’s love interest, are standouts on NBC sitcoms this season). If this is the future of comedy in Hollywood, then there’s little to fear—as long as everyone remembers that brevity is the soul of wit.
