THE MACHINE (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Machine, Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 26, 2023

Based on and inventing a plot from a stand-up comedy bit by Bert Kreischer, The Machine almost certainly has been made for existing fans of the comedian. Others need not apply, apparently, because the movie offers little insight into his appeal and even less evidence that he might be funny as a stand-up.

Neither is the point of this outlandish yet somehow dull movie, which imagines that Kreischer, playing a fictionalized version of himself, is pulled into an internal rivalry between a family of Russian gangsters on account of a drunken adventure he had more than 20 years prior. That the movie never gives us a sense of how or why the two-decades-old story is supposed to be funny is the first of many, many miscalculations here.

Screenwriters Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes assume the audience's foreknowledge of the bit, and obviously, one could blame this critic for not doing the proper research before or even after watching the movie. That would be a fair critique, of course, and as such, here are two rebuttals. First, a movie should provide the necessary background and context for such a foundational element of its plot, if it wants the audience to comprehend what's happening and why we should care that it is happening. Second, the movie is so terrible beyond the lack of that background and context that searching out a key piece of missing information just starts to feel like an act of masochism.

Appropriately, Kreischer plays Bert, a—even more appropriately—successful stand-up comic who is dealing with a slew of personal issues and some lingering doubts about the on-stage persona that has propelled him to such fame. That's mainly because so much of that persona, as a loud and embarrassing and frequently intoxicated party guy, carries over into his private life, if an episode involving him getting his elder teenage daughter Sasha (Jessica Gabor) arrested is any indication.

Bert is trying to work through it by way of therapy, proudly announcing that he hasn't publicly embarrassed himself, has taken up daily exercise, and hasn't called either of his daughters or his wife LeeAnn (Stephanie Kurtzuba) a particularly vulgar term in almost three months. If this is meant to make the guy endearing, it definitely does the job of convincing us that he's probably not particularly funny in his personal life.

The plot has a Russian gangster named Irina (Iva Babić), the daughter of the head of a crime family over there, crashing Sasha's 16th birthday party. By way of her father, Irina knows of Bert's past in her country, when, as a student studying abroad, he and some different mobsters robbed the passengers of a train. One of those passengers was the father, whose watch a younger Bert (played by Jimmy Tatro in flashbacks) stole, turning the man from an upright citizen into a ruthless gangster. He wants his watch back, and Irina is convinced obtaining it will secure her succession to the head of the criminal enterprise.

Bert's father Albert (Mark Hamill, who's at least having some fun) figures into this, too, because Irina threatens to kill his granddaughter if Bert can't recover the watch. Father and son have a lot of unresolved issues, and yes, those are worked out over the course of a cross-country trek across Russia. Well, they're worked out at the very end of the adventure. After all, the screenwriters and director Peter Atencio are far too busy coming up with so many predictable complications and unconvincing diversions that we're left wondering if Kreischer even caught that metaphorical fish, let alone one as big as the yarn that inspired this fictional extension.

If the foundation of Kreischer's story is true, the movie doesn't find a way to make it compelling or funny, especially since the story's Bert is so racked with guilt from the whole episode—which he remembers well enough, apparently, to build a stand-up bit around but forgets enough of for the plot to become a memory-jolting scavenger hunt. Most of it has Bert watching on in shock as the Russian gangsters and their associates get into fights and shootouts, Bert bickering with his father, and those flashbacks that belatedly give us the back story that's so mandatory to understanding why any of this is happening in the first place.

It's a meandering mess of a movie and one that never gives us even a vague idea of the tenor or quality of Kreischer as a comedian. If the Bert of The Machine is any clue to go on, maybe that's for the best.

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