The film begins with a guy cutting the hell out of himself shaving, he then gets in his work suit and heads out to work, but not before stopping at his porch step to inform the audience that time is not a thing and cannot be used or killed as time kills you…and just a buncha hooey like that. We’re then taken to this guy’s office, which doubles as his eternal hell. It’s here that he mindlessly sits at his desk, flashes to scenes of him and his wife having dinner and gets pulled into a card game with Lloyd Kaufman and Mark Borchardt where more weird faces and noises are dealt back and forth than playing cards. And then the whole thing is thankfully done with.
It’s very apparent that Abed has tried to make a David Lynch type film here, but has instead fallen straight on his a*s. There’s even a thank you credit to Lynch at the end of the film as surprising as that is. Most of Lynch’s films are filled with characters that are so separated from their surroundings and other characters that, they’re existing on their own plane. Abed tries to do this, but his sloppy attempt at purposeful awkward character interaction comes off as mind numbingly dull with just a bunch of people sitting around staring at each other with backwards sound effects going on in the background, just in case you didn’t know that this was supposed to be weird. Boo!
I’m sure I missed what the filmmaker was trying to say here because I just didn’t give a damn and I don’t think anybody else would either and this is why. A film should never EVER have its viewer thinking about anything else but what they’re watching, but during “The Tunnel”, I had plenty of time to daydream. I thought about how I really hoped that the big crap I flushed down the toilet yesterday wasn’t the reason to shut down the water supply to my entire apartment complex. I also thought about the fact that I’m getting fat and I patted my belly, vowing to make its swelling stop. And I thought about how much I like peanut butter. I would catch myself, though and avert my attention back to the film, but seeing that nothing had happened, I let my mind wander again.
Speaking of time, “The Tunnel” is a pretentious waste of time.
