Justin's Rating: Massive... pain pounding... Must STOP.,... hurting...
Justin's Review: It's come to my attention that we here at Mutant Reviewers From Hell are just being way too positive toward movies. The other day, my fictional mailman threw my Entertainment Weekly in a puddle and barked, "Why don't you cover more movies you hate? You just love all this filmed crap, but you don't seem to have a mean bone in your Italian body!"

He had a good point. As a man, I had to prove him wrong. Step one was tying him to a tree, covering him with honey, and letting the ants devour his blue carcass. Step two was to purge my soul of one of the worst piles of rancid baby diaper flicks that I had seen in recent memory. That movie was Whipped. I am Justin, Head Mutant.

This film accomplishes a very specific purpose: namely, it makes you deeply ashamed to be a member of either major gender. I went into the theater hoping to see a sassy and quirky forey about dating, and I came out trying to avoid eye contact with my fellow movie patrons. It was akin to exiting an adult store and seeing your entire family there; you just try to wish the experience away. So how did Whipped soil the fertile plains of my masculinity? Simple, it hated everyone.

Our movie opens with the four so-called protagonists, all best buddies who hang out on Sunday afternoons at a local diner to discuss their "dating" lives. There's Brad, an arrogant jock. There's Eric, a whiney married spud living vicariously through his friends' lives. There's Jonathan, a chronic masturbator whose major sin is that he only has sex with (gasp) women he cares about. There's Zeke, a model for a coffeshop beatnik Antichrist. Right off the bat, these four jerks ramble on proudly about their various scamming techniques (scamming defined as "lying as to get a woman to have sex with you"). The major unsaid assumption is that we all identify both with the losers and with the sole desire to have sex instead of meaningful relationships. And I don't exactly know how to specify where the line between extreme language to be funny and extreme language to be utterly repulsive lies, but Whipped settles firmly into the latter category. I mean, seriously, I felt HORRIBLE the couple times I laughed, because the things they were saying were so totally repugnant.

Commercials would have you believe that Mia (Amanda Peet) is the star of this vehicle and in it pretty much constantly, but she really only has a supporting role. She shows up "coincidentally" (yes, I hate to use quote marks in this fashion, but somehow it fits the film) to each of the three single guys and dates them all simultaneously. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this might have the plot twists that you've seen in many many sitcoms to date. Not so for director X, who sucks any joy out of this faster than a Florida mosquito on my eyeball. Just as soon as a scene threatens to be funny, it takes a U-turn and becomes a lame commentary on dating, or a pathetic try at humanity, or jams us up to our armpit in an overflowing toilet. Literally.

THIS NEXT PART IS A SPOILER. FOR THE END OF THE FILM. I'M SERIOUSLY HOPING YOU'LL NEVER WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE SO THAT YOU CAN ENJOY MY WITTY DECONSTRUCTION CONTAINED IN THIS PARAGRAPH. THAT IS ALL. As if you couldn't see it coming, a "major twist" at the "end" of the film, it turns out that Mia has been scamming the guys just as bad as they had scammed other women! Wow! The woman is worse than the guys, if that were possible! That makes it so nobody is an honorable character and everyone is two periodic elements below slime! Again, the filmmaker assumes that the entire world revolves around cheap, meaningless sex (which, in reality, is only large portions of L.A.). The moral, what I could ascertain, is that people are little more than erotic scoreboard points. I don't talk like this. Do you talk like this? Now, if this were a satire of the comedic sort, it might have worked. But the filmmakers, the characters, the dialogue, the plot... it's plain cruel. Demeaning toward everyone. Whipped clocks in at a mere 82 minutes, but it felt like the entire run of Married With Children (sans humor). I would recommend this film for your ex-girlfriends or -boyfriends, just so that you can feel better about yourself having never seen this film and he or she committing suicide to major portions of their frontal lobes.

Amanda Peet deserves a lot better than this film, as evidenced by her role in The Whole Nine Yards (I wish all hitmen were this pretty).

Didja Notice?
That I hated this movie?

Intermission!
I (and a lot of other internet movie critics) were bombarded with e-mails asking us to screen this film in advance. I think they knew that the major "TV" critics were going to hate this movie, and were looking for positive soundbites from someone, anyone. Look elsewhere, I say!

If you liked this movie, try these:
In The Company of Men