Crapshoot 2015: What the F--- am I watching!

Uh?

The last 3 months have taught me quite a bit about what you find when seeking bad movies.

Sometimes you hit some pleasant surprises that aren't worth their hype. Sometimes you find things that stoke the fires of your rage so powerfully that you can’t forget them no matter how much you regret watching them in the first place. Every once in a while however, you stumble across something that just leaves you baffled. Not content with simply being bad, they have to go above and beyond not only to hopelessly and hilariously fail to accomplish what they set out to but somehow manage to achieve the opposite effect of what was intended.

A great deal has been made about “The Identical’s” destiny to achieve cult status and it’s easy to see why.

Trying to describe this movie is a task of herculean proportions in and of itself, let alone deciphering what could have possibly went into its thought process. Letting go of the conceit of telling an Elvis Presley story without Elvis rights, I've been asking myself for months now what the aim was of telling the fictional story of his stillborn twin. Any desire to tell a pseudo Elvis biopic falls apart on a conceptual level, which is ignoring a bizarre moment in which Elvis is brought up casually in dialogue, completely ignoring the film’s creation of Drexel the Dream as an analogue to him within this world and whatever religious message was intended to be delivered through a gratuitous focus on the Six-Day War is nonexistent; to call it half-baked would be to insinuated it was particularly thought out in the slightest.

Simply put, “The Identical” can barely even be defined but I can hardly even get hung up on its premise because the execution of the film is so wonderfully bungled as if its goal were to intentionally make Tommy Wiseau look like David O. Russell.

I expected the idea of a 40 year old Blake Rayne playing the never aging 16 year old son of a 60 year old Ray Liotta to get old really fast, especially entering it knowing what was coming. It doesn't.

Watching Rayne confusedly mumble his way through 2 to 3 decades of his life looking the same across the ages while his father grows older and Ashley Judd, his 46 year old mother, doesn't age at all made every drama laden family meal between them all sitting at the table too hilarious for me to even keep the film running, forcing me to pause every minute or so to get the laughs out of my system whenever I wasn't snickering at the period inappropriate music littered throughout the movie.

Words can’t do justice to just how much of a horrible glory “The Identical” is. Don’t take my word for it; rent it and enjoy it yourself. If hitting the jackpot isn't a musically driven drama in which the dozens of background extras are so terrible that they can’t even dance in rhythm with one another to the individual songs being played at any given time, I don’t know what is.

On the other end of the spectrum of the cinematic question of “how did this get made,” we have the third part of an Ayn Rand novel adaptation, the previous films of which bombed so powerfully that its conservative producers had to resort to crowd funding platforms to fill out a portion of the film’s minuscule marketing and production budget.

That irony is the lone fact that kept me from mustering any sort of true hatred towards “Atlas Shrugged: Part Three.”

Its quality is irrelevant right from the get go because bringing her sociopathic philosophical claptrap to the big screen required the misguided silver spoon holding dolts concerned more with their own bottom line than the security of our species to make Rand spin in her own grave had she ever known.

Of course, that doesn't excuse the film from sucking regardless but I almost have to applaud the filmmakers for going big on the suck.

Where “The Identical’s” failure was almost adorable akin to watching a Three Stooges-esque screw up with sincere intentions, “Atlas Shrugged: Part Three” is like watching a slacker bomb his final exam that he desperately struggled to pass via a single overnight study session after slacking off for an entire semester; there was only one inevitability to come but you can’t deny a certain amount of basic satisfaction in seeing it come to fruition.

At the risk of bringing up a cliché beaten into the ground, there’s only one way I can truly summarize this movie.

Setting aside the faults of a philosophy that fundamentally contradicts a type of social cooperation that sits among the building blocks of society, this is quite possibly one of the single most technically incompetent films ever made. While Dagny Taggart’s quest to earn money at the expense of the safety of her workers has never exactly been endearing, it’s been more or less just backward and pointless on the level of a SyFy Channel original movie.

With “Part 3,” the “Atlas Shrugged” saga has reached a territory of anti-filmmaking. Every second of this movie needs to be preserved and deconstructed in film courses on how to not make movies.

What little humanity these characters may have previously had has not only been sucked out by dialogue that feels written by a rejected Forbes magazine editor but is inconsistent with their already thin characterizations due to a cast overhaul that obliterates continuity between entries despite telling a story that apparently takes place within the span of a few brief years.

Redheads from the first film become brunettes, tall white men from “Part 1” become short Hispanic men with accents; you name it, it goes horribly wrong.

From casting, to acting, to writing, every inch of this film was sunken before it even came out but if you ever needed proof of the Golden Raspberry Awards’ lack of integrity, that the horrendous editing work alone didn't earn it recognition is a crime in and of itself.

When a room full of non-epileptic people go dizzy and begin to fear seizure because of over 5 camera cuts in less than 3 seconds in order to simply capture somebody moving forward onto a bed, you probably should have just extended both middle fingers to me and made it a found footage film.

The only complement that I can pay “Atlas Shrugged: Part Three” beyond its capacity to be exalted as a boogie man for film industry technicians to inspire competence is that it spared me the full length of the insipid, self righteous, rambling John Galt speech which was already agonizingly longer than it necessary to begin with.