At the Tempe screening of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell the real Tucker Max, the main character from the film, made an appearance. Four minutes into his pre-show routine — one in which he treats every fan like a hostile witness or comedy-show heckler — he had painfully shared stories of dead prostitutes, objectified turkey legs and using abortion payments to rack up frequent flyer miles on his credit card.One fan stood up, grabbed a mic and seemed ready to brag about a sexual assault he perpetrated as a “joke.” Tucker, the screening’s foul-mouthed court jester, cut the fan off before he implicated himself in something that required police intervention. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “at least Tucker has some limits.”
Tucker Max is offensive for offensive’s sake. He claims he’s not a bigot because he hates everyone almost equally. He claims he’s not a misogynist because, after all, he has sex with thousands of women, so by default he must love them, right? Remember when mountaineering pioneer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest and he responded, “Because it’s there.” Why does Tucker say crude things? For no other reason than because they’re there. The movie would have been better served without its star personality in attendance, mainly because afterward you could plainly see how the film watered down the real Tucker, a mean-spirited and bitter young man who has crafted a franchise from his drunken sexual exploits for the frat-boy branch of future alcoholics of America. The Tucker in the film is not nearly as toxic, which may be its only redeeming quality.
The film follows law student Tucker Max (Matt Czuchry) as he pesters his friend Dan (Geoff Stults) for a rambunctious bachelor party before his wedding to a girl far too sweet for a movie like this. Against his better judgment, Dan relents to a road trip that can only end bad, and has ended bad in a dozen other better films. Tucker and Dan bring along another buddy, Drew (Jesse Bradford, Flags of Our Fathers), who recently broke up with his girlfriend when he found her cheating with a celebrity rapper named Grillionaire, which sounds like a McDonalds prize giveaway. Beer in Hell pretty much follows a well-worn path through the rowdy bachelor party formula: naked women shimmy from poles, the drinking increases, someone ends up in jail with puke in his hair, the wedding is in jeopardy after the bride’s phone calls go unanswered and Tucker wakes up in bed with a little person, a conquest on par with his bedding of a blind girl and a deaf girl. “Hey, you’re halfway to a Helen Keller,” a friend tells him. Disabled Americans should froth at all this, even if it’s all in “good fun.”
Most of the film is Tucker sharing his twisted theories on life with whoever will listen, be it strippers, drunk bachelorettes or his easily manipulated friends. His core belief system is that women are nothing until a man completes them. That man, of course, is Tucker, who thinks he’s God’s gift to everything. Parts of the film are funny, though not nearly as funny as similar scenes in its far-more-intelligent 2009 comedy counterpart, The Hangover. Many parts are disgusting beyond description, including an extended sequence involving diarrhea and plastic-wrapped toilets. One of the better subplots is with the Bradford character who is so angry and bitter toward women after his breakup that he can barely stomach the strippers gyrating in front of him. He taunts and ridicules them until one fights back, they retreat back to her place to have a Halo 3 tournament and then he falls in love with her. I wasn’t sure I liked this development until they left the club and began actually talking and you could sense they were real, albeit shallow, people.
Most of the movie, though, is a vain attempt for Tucker Max to mythologize and deify Tucker Max. It’s a monument to himself disguised as a comedy franchise. The stories, or variations of them, are taken from his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a book I’ve read and appreciated for its honest writing and Gonzo style. Seeing it on the screen, though, made me cringe. I would compare it most to Fight Club, another flawed monument to man’s failing masculinity — Roger Ebert called it “macho porn,” a term that works for both movies. Who cares whether they serve beer in hell or not. My question is this: Is hell big enough for Tucker Max’s over-inflated ego?
