Raunchy, Unrated Comedy Will Make You Hate Your New Neighbor

By Robert Scucci
| Published 32 seconds ago

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you know how hard it is to use simple language to get your point across. Written, published words are forever, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of overcomplicating things. Mark Twain famously said, “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.” As much as I wanted to enjoy 2020’s The Mimic, written and directed by Thomas F. Mazziotti, I mostly felt like I was back in college workshopping an overzealous undergrad’s short story that was clearly written with the help of a well-worn thesaurus.

It’s not that the movie isn’t funny at times, or that the characters aren’t great. It is, and they are. The problem is that nobody talks like this, and dialogue meant to sound witty often makes the whole thing play like a prolonged episode of Gilmore Girls. The Mimic certainly tries to be a smart and witty comedy, but I’d enjoy it more if it didn’t feel like it was constantly reminding me how smart and funny it was.

The Kid Is A Sociopath

The plot for The Mimic would make for a great sketch or even a sitcom episode, but its 81-minute runtime becomes tiresome once you get to know the principal characters. Our protagonist, simply billed as The Narrator (Thomas Sadoski), is a widower and a writer (it’s all starting to make sense now). When The Kid (Jake Robinson) becomes a presence in his life, The Narrator immediately suspects he might be a sociopath. His reasoning is simple: The Kid copies everything he does and seems to have no personality of his own. The Kid never breaks eye contact while conversing, suggesting he’s constantly sizing up whoever he’s interacting with.

The Kid also has a number of odd hobbies, including ducks (in general), wild mushrooms, and talking about a wife who is never seen on screen. Fascinated by The Kid, and eager to prove his theory, The Narrator consults a woman known only as The Librarian (Jessica Keenan Wynn) so he can learn more about sociopathy. His ultimate goal is to write a story about The Kid and impress the women who work at the local paper, who constantly “bicker over semicolons.” As the two men get to know each other better, it slowly dawns on The Narrator that he and The Kid aren’t so different after all, raising the very real possibility that The Narrator himself may also be a sociopath.

All of the above scenarios make for a solid comedy if done right, but the standout moments that truly made me cackle, like The Kid’s awkward, impromptu bathroom escapades with Gina Gershon’s “Woman at the Bar” character, are few and far between.

That’s It. That’s The Whole Thing

Being married to a woman who was a teenager when Gilmore Girls was the talk of the town, the only thought I had while watching The Mimic is that The Narrator and The Kid are basically male versions of Rory and Lorelai Gilmore. Every single conversation becomes a rapid-fire deluge of pop culture references, psychological ramblings, and gotcha-style exchanges that force the viewer to keep up with them, despite the fact that most of these exchanges don’t drive the story at all.

What’s unfortunate is that there are some tremendous zingers here, but you’ll probably miss them while trying to unpack every single line of dialogue in real time.

Circling back to that Creative Writing 101 vibe, The Mimic falls into all the familiar traps. Mazziotti is too precious with his jokes and doesn’t always know when to trim things down. Given the film’s 81-minute runtime, it often feels like there simply wasn’t enough story to stretch the premise into a feature-length film. It makes you wonder how much better this might have worked if the whole thing had been trimmed to a sharp 20 or 30 minutes.

Things get even more convoluted when the perspective zooms out and we learn that two characters known as The Director (M. Emmet Walsh) and The Writer (Doug Plaut) are actively writing the script for The Mimic, arguing about motivation and how much of each character’s backstory should be revealed to the audience. The whole thing smells like an undergrad’s notebook. The kind of smell you get when the PB&J they packed a week ago and forgot about breaches the Ziploc bag and leaks all over the first draft right before peer review.

The Mimic, as a concept, has a lot of promise. As a feature-length film, though, it ends up feeling like all flash and no smash. I wouldn’t mind spending more time with these characters because they’re genuinely fun and riff well off each other, but I wish we got a more distilled, cohesive version of what Mazziotti was trying to accomplish.

As of this writing, The Mimic is streaming for free on Tubi.