Search Party (2014)

Pop-culture references, witty banter, broad slapstick, and sentimental speeches all fall equally flat.

These films were always down on women – Armstrong squanders the peerless Krysten Ritter as eye candy – but this slovenly runaround only exposes the low opinion they’ve harboured of their target male demographic. We’re meant to identify with them?

As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.

The comedy here feels secondhand and becomes grating when no cliche is left unused, whether about nationality, race, gays or the female gender.

This is safe, hyper-conventional stuff, lazy enough to make you feel bad that Middleditch had to free willy for it. The best thing you can say about the movie is that men have taken their pants off for less.