Protraph Lack of good storyline.

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

rooprect "The Darwin Awards" is a breezy dark comedy that attempts to capitalize on the cult popularity of the website of the same name, but falls short in that respect. Still, it's a fun & entertaining story, well worth the price of admission.In the late 90s, coinciding with the internet explosion, urban legends (or rumors too juicy to be true) took the world by storm. Immediately, several TV & film studios jumped on the sensation, putting together productions like "Urban Legend" (1998), "Magnolia" (1999), "Myth Busters" (2003), "1000 Ways to Die" (2008), and "The Darwin Awards" (2006). All of the above focus on strange-but-largely-untrue stories of human stupidity, providing morbidly funny entertainment. The biggest problem is that "The Darwin Awards", while purporting to be based on the true stories found on the website, in actuality doesn't use any true stories but instead falls back on the standard urban legends we know so well. In other words, none of the stuff in this movie is true, despite what the title leads you to believe (visit the Darwin Awards website and click the "Urban Legend" link at the bottom).OK, if you can get past that, I think you'll enjoy the movie. The plot is pretty original: an ex detective (Joseph Fiennes) and an insurance investigator (Winona Ryder) team up on a road trip that takes them cross country checking out some quirky claims, while each of them confronts their own personal quirks.It does a pretty good job of tying together the urban legends in a linear story with some romance, laughs, mystery and a nice moral statement. Of all the titles I mentioned above, this is probably my favourite because it covers so much ground without getting too heady. In the end, it's great entertainment for an evening.Other films like this I recommend (dark comedies) are "Grand Theft Parsons" (2003), "Remarkable Power" (2008) and "The Last Word" (2008).

Lee Eisenberg Whoa! In this movie, we get everything from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Metallica, all centered on pointing out idiocy. "The Darwin Awards" is based on the website that jokingly awards people who accidentally kill themselves or render themselves infertile via incredibly stupid acts (like juggling hand grenades) and thereby remove themselves from the gene pool. The best parts of the movie are the moronic deeds with which people come up; seriously, can people be that dumb?! Much of the drags a little bit, and the documentary-style filming looks really weird. Still, the imbecilic gags make up for that. The cast is so giant that I won't take the time to name it.

red_hyro It took roughly five minutes to tell The Darwin Awards was an awful, misbegotten, badly directed piece of tripe; I gave it another fifteen to change my mind, and when it didn't, I turned it off, not willing to give up another hour and change being tortured with gag inducing 'quirky' characters undergoing a 'quirky' storyline that would no doubt entreat the viewer to find its 'quirky' heart and undergo a 'quirky' catharsis. The disgust this movie induced in me was a familiar sort, and when I checked IMDb and saw it was by the same fellow who inflicted "Dream with the Fishes" on hundreds of unsuspecting film enthusiasts including myself, Finn Taylor, I understood what I needed to do, namely warn you, my fellow movie watchers, against this and any other film written and directed by this man. (There are only three, the two aforementioned and "Cherish"; it's a small blessing that Taylor seems to take his time either writing, editing or -more likely- getting funding for his project, which have come out at four to five year intervals.) You may, like me, have been curious about this film due to your also having chuckled at the grotesque comedy of the Darwin award winners, but I will say in all honesty, this film does not do them justice. Ironically, the filmmaker himself has not has his career killed churning out these horrifically stupid films, which would seem to imply that the Hollywood independent film scene is not governed by natural selection. That's a pity.What is the essence of what makes this and his other films suck? It's a number of things, starting with the quirkiness. Why bother with richly imagined characters when you can stack up a couple esoteric phobias and qualities and call it macaroni? Why indeed. So our main character in The Darwin Awards is a police profiler who faints at the sight of blood: comedy gold, because you know it is just soooo ironic, and irony is best when it isn't subtle and is poorly executed in annoyingly mannered performances.Then there is the 'intelligence' of the scripts, where you'll find, for instance, a serial killer complaining about the profiler quoting an overused line from a famous poem. How exquisite, and yet in the midst of such a badly made film, one sees the difference between knowledge and practical wisdom.The Darwin Awards features a moronic and grating student documentary maker who is following the main character around, giving another 'clever' layer to the film, by annoying the viewer with those stupid camera frame lines that let you know when you're looking through the documentary filmmakers pov, versus all the other shots that aren't annoying hand-held drek. The maker of the actual film tries to avoid being seen as pretentious and untalented by having a filmmaker in it that is satirized as being pretentious and untalented. Because I'm an irresponsible reviewer, I'll guess that this character is an unconscious avatar of Taylor's own self-doubts about his talent, and I'm hoping someone who knows and loves this man will play intellectual midwife to him and help him realize that he should stop making films, and maybe consider a profession more suited to his talents, which I'm sure are substantial, albeit not manifested in his cinematic work thus far. They say as a young man, Kurosawa was interested in painting, but realized after a time that while he was proficient enough, his works were derivative, and so he got into film making, where he excelled. Perhaps Finn Taylor should get out of film making and become a painter.

sophistic8 I hadn't heard anything about this film prior to renting it. The fact that Ryder and Fiennes were credited on the box were the main reasons I picked it up. I don't think ANY comedy ever gets recognized for what it's worth, but this one ranks right up there with some of the best. I've seen so many films...I'm rarely surprised by the content anymore, but this was genuinely unique and funny. Even the Darwinian personalities were developed with affection---a feat which must have been a difficult proposition, given the number of idiotic things that people manage to do, and how easy it would have been to simply portray them as single-dimensional dimwits deserving of extinction! The lack of malice depicting characters we'd normally describe as clearly contributing to a thinning of the gene pool makes us identify with these people: Who HASN'T suffered a lapse in judgement at one time or another?! I especially found the sound-track amusing--every song was obviously chosen for the relationship it bore to the characters or content in each scene, and even though there was no subtlety to the selection, I found humor in most of the associations. This was, in spite of the content, death and swearing...a film that actually gives me hope for humanity. *grin* Definitely worth watching--go rent it!