Murder Bury Win is a poor man’s Rough Night (2017) without the clever dialogue or the slapstick humor of Breaking Bad. Yet, instead of the pleasant social commentary of toxic female friendships and the sharp critiques of various demographics of American women, we’re given an out of place, loosely connected smattering of comic tropes with no past history or personality.
In Breaking Bad, the humor of the first few seasons comes from the fact that Walter White is play acting at being bad. In the exact same situation of disposing a body, there’s a moment from MBW that feels like such an homage that it feels strange that there’s no reference to it in the pop culture of the universe of the movie. When Walter tries to dispose of the body by “melting it,” he’s too smart by half, and burns a hole through the tub itself, and the floor:
There’s no such buffoonery in MBW. They’re not quite bumbling, not quite competent, and there’s very little backstory or chemistry to bind the core group to one another. Our psychopathic member of the trio, a kind of dime store Adam Devine, doesn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the film, and his progression of bad decisions drags the movie down a disappointingly unimaginative set of “logical decisions,” that leave it feeling at times sanitary but also boring.
The plot is composed of three scenes. The two long conversation scenes in a cabin are not well paced: the first reflects on the act of playing board games, which feels aggravatingly slow and a lot like watching people play hands of poker in Casino Royale, and the other rehashes a played out joke about the identity of a famously secretive game maker. The movie doesn’t really know how to resolve itself or dig its characters out of the monumental mess they have put themselves in, so it resorts to a comically unsatisfying neck-breaking flash forward to round things out.
This movie isn’t just lazy storytelling, it’s board game concept, central to the whole conceit of the movie, is not very thoughtful. I was hoping that it would be filled with a bunch of board game send-offs like Scott Pilgrim or Wreck-It Ralph. It’s not. The concept is a posture without substance like too much else in this movie.
