One Bad Mice is a bad film, but it knows it’s a bad film. Or at least I think it does. If it were played straight and serious, it could be “so bad it’s legendary,” like The Room. Instead, it doesn’t take itself seriously at all, with almost slapstick flare, making it charming enough to not dismiss entirely.
At the simplest level, One Bad Mice is about a brother, Johnny (Art Duarte), who avenges his half-sister’s rape by killing a bunch of drug dealers. This doesn’t go over well with the drug dealers’ boss, Eddie (Gary Head), and he sets his goons out to capture and kill Johnny… if they can find him. Johnny is smooth like a ninja, and the only lead they have on him is the memory of the elderly drug courier who saw him leave the scene. When the drug dealers kidnap Johnny’s half-sister, however, they can be assured that he’ll find them.
From the very opening, this film is absurd. The editing is overly choppy and confusing for Johnny’s opening hit squad, and for a movie with as many gunshots and deaths as this one, there is never a muzzle flash or blood, just the sound effect of a gunshot. It’s almost like someone was playing pretend, and were secretly being filmed.
On top of that, the film is full of pointless exposition, which is consistently compromised in its occasional attempts at plot development by the hip hop score that often doesn’t remotely work with the conversation’s subject matter.
There’s also the comedy to consider. For a film that opens with a mass murder, it then sprinkles in tremendous amounts of gibberish humor. Johnny seems to hear his dead mother, and talks to her out loud. The old man who witnessed Johnny is a walking senility joke; picking his nose, pissing himself, knocking people out, always in the bathroom… just random nonsense. There’s even a scene where Johnny is hiding at his friend’s apartment when his friend gets the visit from a model showing off her portfolio… which is full of stick figure drawings of herself. What!?!
Again, this movie is not good, but you get the feeling it never really wanted or tried to be good. This is a comedy, that simple. In that sense, you have to view it in the “awful but somewhat entertaining” vein. It’s the type of film you watch after you and your friends get drunk and want to watch something insane. Not good; insane.
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