Avis des critiques

The appeal of the film is seeing talented comedians enact their stunts and set-pieces in front of unwitting members of the public, pushing the hidden camera format to its limits and revealing a lot of Americans to be surprisingly decent.

“Bad Trip” is an extension of Andre and Sakurai’s eight-year creative partnership on Adult Swim’s “The Eric Andre Show,” five seasons of aggressive performance art disguised as a talk show.

Natural human behavior can be extremely funny, and Sakurai and André know it’s possible to bring it out of people without being mean-spirited. Footage in the end credits of the real people excited to learn that they’re in a movie—a comfort for us as well—confirms the chaos is controlled physically and emotionally, and that allows it to be a party.

Why Andre and his screenwriting collaborators Dan Curry and Katao Sakurai (who also directed) felt the need to construct a narrative... is a mystery. It's never remotely involving, and you can feel the lead performers straining to handle their acting chores. The exception is Haddish, who is so convincingly scary and menacing here that you wish her character were in a better, dramatic movie.

Though Bad Trip is a loose, often shapeless movie, its focus on the common humanity of those caught by its lenses is certainly a choice on the part of the filmmakers. It wouldn’t have been hard to accelerate these situations to the point where everyone began to act like jerks, and one presumes plenty of stuff has been cut out.

Andre and Howery are going for the most exaggerated version of raunch that will either leave you dying of laughter or dying for it to be over. With pranks including getting sexually assaulted by a gorilla, a pair of penises caught in a Chinese finger trap, and getting a hand stuck in a blender, the one-note approach to humor may feel tiresome for some viewers. But with the variance of audience reactions and brisk pace, thankfully it never runs out of gas.

In other, the sheer hilariousness of a number of individual bits here are enough to get you past slow spots and a few D.O.A. duds, and you come out of Bad Trip with a serious appreciation for this trio’s chops and ability to go with the flow... And unlike the Jackass crew’s how-low-can-you-go competitions and Borat‘s politicized exposés, there’s almost a sweetness to the way these folks prank the public.

What’s most distinguishable about Bad Trip is the way that it depicts the public which it interacts with. The film never aims to humiliate or dehumanize its subjects—instead of being disparaged or mocked in the name of comedy, bystanders are portrayed as more of a righteous tribunal than mere crabs in a barrel... This ability to invoke public reaction... is what allows the fabric of Bad Trip’s humor to shine through.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone. An end-credits reveal of the hidden cameras to the film’s good-natured dupes has a humorous purity that’s unexpected and appealing — if far too late to mitigate the dreck that has gone before.