“Jersey Guy” is such a painfully awful film that recalling it in order to write this review fills me with disgust. This emetic feature is a horror on every possible emotional and intellectual level and giving it any sort of attention, even a negative review, shows more kindness to its creators than its creators bothered to show to the audience.
Let’s keep this as brief as possible: a snarky, sarcastic 25-year-old named Jack works in a New Jersey nursing home where the elderly residents are either senile or incontinent or constantly screaming inane complaints or all of the above. Jack’s romantic life is equally dreadful. He turns insulting when his screechy girlfriend wants to take their seven-year relationship into marriage, and at one point he tries to change the subject by imitating his girlfriend’s mother drinking the contents of a used condom. In a rare trip across the Hudson to a Manhattan night club (he is the rare New Jersey resident who views New York as being as distant as Mongolia), Jack meets a glamorous model who immediately goes ga-ga for him. He promptly begins cheating on his girlfriend with this hot model, and his misfit buddies in the nursing home (who follow his exploits like racetrack addicts watching the horses) think he is the stud to end all studs. But after a while he starts feeling pangs of guilt…sort of.
It is hard to imagine which is the worst element of “Jersey Guy.” The film’s miserable depiction of the elderly will disgust anyone who has respect for seniors. Its view of women is so astonishingly misogynistic that it is surprising any women actually agreed to be involved in the film. And its horrid screenplay, which is over packed with nasty putdowns and smarmy slurs, is not helped by a cast completely devoid of talent who dribble their lines all over the place. Ultimately, this film is so mean-spirited and it presents such a warped and sour view of life that everyone who collaborated on its production should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
But the greatest insult of them all is actually off-screen: “Jersey Guy” is being distributed in the United States by Castle Hill Productions, a company which once offered moviegoers the films of Cassavetes, Welles and Fellini plus Oscar-nominated documentaries like “A Great Day in Harlem.” If s**t like “Jersey Guy” is the best they can serve, they should auction off their film catalog, sell their furniture and close the office.
