Uncle Nick (2015)

CRUMBLIES… NONE. AT ALL.

Don’t bother. Just don’t.

This is one of the worst films old Jack has seen in over 70 years on the planet. It is crass. It is ghastly. It is vile. Shame on all of those involved: you wrote something incoherent, directed it messily, edited it like a dilettante, and – oh dear God – wrote foul dialogue, ugly jokes and inconsistent, repellant characters. Shame on you.

And, no, this isn’t my winter cold speaking. This comes straight from an affronted sense of humour and, wow, yes, taste. This shit got funded!

Uncle Nick is ostensibly the cheery Christmas tale of a boorish old soul pitted against uptight relatives on the day of goodwill. What larks! Then… He wanks! He leers! He targets the conveniently sexualised twenty year old nearly-niece as though blind to his own age, gut and alcoholic breath. And the film lets him. And – worse – assumes we’re cheering him on.

Oh yes. Old Jack and buddies over 50 are assumed to cackle wildly as he wrecks the towels, outwits his family and gets that young woman into a car and ready to pounce on his rank physique.

I’m sorry. Old Jack may be ill, but he can still divine work so shoddy it shouldn’t be let in the home.

Oh – and in the final third it gets serious! Really – Uncle Nick is gifted an awwwwwwwww story. He has a sad tale to tell. But by this point you hate him so much you wish it was worse.

So…

• Brian Posehn doesn’t get close to the range needed to make Nick anything more than a cheap, poor Trump. He is lost against all the other characters and his own blunder into seriousness.
• Beau Ballinger plays his creepy brother with a venality that bores.
• Paget Brewster – the best comedy actor present – out-classes the lot of them and is probably missing this off her CV already. Why did you do this?
• Scott Adsit – really? Why? 30 Rock to this???
• Um…

There are others, but if there’s anyone that triggered genuine emotion it was Melia Renee as the nearly-niece Valerie. She just about gets away with playing the idiocy and self-destruction of her character as a source of comedy, but is objectified so completely in the final reel that old Jack felt real embarrassment for the actress. Amazingly, a beautiful girl, half naked, made this old man angry. You’d feel better about yourself typing “naked lady orgy” into Google. Pity the film-makers didn’t spend their time doing that instead.

Uncle Nick assumes its audience enjoys watching what it presents. And what it presents is mindless, nasty and a mess.

So think more of yourself and watch Scrooged again.