Film: Waiting

In the cinema, the trailers were not a good sign. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, (Another sequel for those who use Max Power as a combustion-based jizz-mag), Stay Alive (Computer game comes to life, but you have to… stay alive!) and Click, a Bruce Almighty-ish vehicle for Adam Sandler involving a universal remote, but he hasn’t scored a critical goal since The Waterboy. Uh oh, this must be the target demographic...
You expect a gross-out comedy, and well, it will do half the job, but not the half one you really wanted.
Waiting… (the dots included) is about a sub-standard steak house, and crams a whole day in the life of the dozen or so employees, book-ended by the end-of-day parties. In rawk frat-house style.
As a poor trainee is given the tour and the training, he’s also drawn into the restaurant’s self-styled game of genital puppetry, ranging from ‘the bat-wing’ to ‘the goat’. Fortunately for sensitive audiences, there’s only a few testicle shots. But, they are there.
Ryan Reynolds takes the lead, as a self-appointed ring-leader of the waiting circus, and comes across as so smug that he may just implode from the gravitational pull of his own self-worship. Teen comedy veteran Anna Faris vamps around as the generic slut and barely gets the chance to crack a joke, which is odd, and a waste.
The film is all hearty man-laughs, testicle surprises, sleeping with school-girls anecdotes, “…don’t know what to do with my life” angst, and soon becomes repetitive arrogant trash.
They have attempted to cram a film about a restaurant into a very strict template snatched from Clerks. (Which is even name-checked in the credits, several characters are all but cloned from it.)
But deep in there is the seed of what could have became an interesting comedy. The conversations aren’t as stupid as American Pie, and there’s a lot more of them, but the set pieces and gross-outs aren’t as surprising, either and just aren’t funny enough.
The rule is; don’t piss off people who prepare food for you, they even mention it in the film, but you know that already, and if you have seen the trailer, you have seen the funniest parts already.
If Waiting... was a teen-based dessert it’d be plain vanilla ice cream, with a pubic side.