QUASI - Mark Reviews Movies

Quasi, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 19, 2023

Comedy is famously and, sometimes, notoriously subjective, so it's not exactly fair to say that there isn't a single laugh to be had while watching Quasi. The new movie from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard will certainly be laughed at by some (Those who know why and take advantage of the fact that the movie is being released on the 20th day of the month of April might have better luck with the material, for example). For those who don't find the movie's take on one of Victor Hugo's most famous characters to be anywhere near as clever or silly as the comic team clearly does, it's pretty much an insufferable experience.

To start, the screenplay, written by—although that's probably a generous description of the process of working out this plot and these gags—the comedians (Jay Chandrasekhar, director Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhankse), abandons just about every element of the Hugo novel (The on-the-cheap production, which looks as if it would be envious of a Renaissance fair, probably prevented any such attempt). It does star a man with a hunchback, who was raised in the Paris cathedral of Notre-Dame and served as its bell-ringer, but this story picks up after or entirely eliminates the whole of Hugo's story. Lemme sort of plays Quasimodo, too, in the fact that his name is Quasi Modo, and if that's intended to be a joke, the troupe forget the setup and the punch line.

There's no reason at all for this character to be based on Hugo's, except that it gets to make a lot of jokes at the expense of his physicality—from repeated references to "fatty deposits," to the way his mouth is off-kilter (a distracting sight gag that's surely not worth the physical discomfort Lemme likely felt in constantly distorting his expression), to the gushing blood of a stab wound in his hump later in the story (That's at least kind of amusing, although the spray conveniently avoids all of the actors, likely to save on cleaning expenses). In this variation, Quasi lives in Medieval Paris, works as a torturer in the castle dungeon, and just kind of puts up with being the butt of constant insults and physical abuse (His introduction comes with people hurling insults and manure at him).

The plot—and there is a lot of it, unfortunately, for a comedy that tries to goof off in just about every other way—revolves around a double-assassination scheme. After winning a raffle for a private audience with the pope (His hut-mate and not-best-friend gave him the ticket, just to add to the convolutions of the plotting), Quasi is enlisted by King Guy (Chandrasekhar), newly wed to soon-to-be queen Catherine (Adrianne Palicki) after having his first wife executed, to murder Pope Cornelius (Soter). Upon meeting with Cornelius, the pontiff demands that Quasi commit regicide. The result is intended to be a comedy of errors, but the only error here is how much time and effort are wasted on trying to make something of the plot.

The jokes are constant, which is to be expected, or at least, the attempts at them are, which is why it feels so miserable. Some of the alleged zingers include a torture guinea pig (played by Stolhankse) who is put to the rack and gets taller as a result (The movie can't quite figure out if the joke is that nobody notices or that everybody does), a string of jesters (also played by Lemme) who fail to make the king laugh (It's easy to sympathize) and are brutally punished and/or killed as a result, and one scene of traumatic genital mutilation that's played in graphic, discomforting detail. Somehow, that last one might be less offensive than a throwaway mother-in-law joke, if only because watching someone have his scrotum nailed to a tree trunk isn't lazy humor by any stretch of the imagination.

If there are some nice things to say about this, it's that Palicki is a real sport, smart enough to know not to try to force a laugh and coming out with her dignity intact, and Brian Cox provides some opening narration that has some promise, mainly because of his dulcet tones and dry delivery (The closing narration, which sets up a sequel, appropriately sounds like a threat coming from him). If we're going to stay polite at the end here, the rest of Quasi, which is a lot for a thin premise and a relatively short running time, exists.

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