Meet Bill
Rating: 3/10
I tend to enjoy movies about midlife crises. You can build a wonderful story around a character whose well-established life is falling apart. You can keep the audience on their toes because in the midst of a crisis, it’s not always clear in which direction a character will go. “Meet Bill” falls under the midlife crisis category and, based on preliminary information about the film, I thought it would be a decent film. Bill is played by Aaron Eckhart, whose performance in “Thank You For Smoking” was stellar. Throw in a bit of eye candy in the form of Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Alba and we got us a movie, right? Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.
“Meet Bill” tries to follow in the footsteps of “American Beauty” and “The Weatherman”, but has no real story to support its sagging dead weight. From the get go we’re supposed to sympathize with Bill because he’s got a gut, messy hair, and compulsively eats Snickers bars. We quickly find out that his wife Jess (Elizabeth Banks) is shacking up with a local TV news reporter Chip (Timothy Olyphant). The in-laws think Bill is a lame push-over and he works as a phony executive at his father in law’s bank. He dreams of independence, and thus wishes to take part in donut shop franchise.
The final part of the puzzle is “the Kid”, a prep school student played by young Logan Lerman. His job is to shake things up further, providing Bill with the youthful spirit he needs to shake off his middle age slumber.
Meet Bill provides actor Eckhart with plenty of chances to embarrass himself, but none of them are particularly funny. In fact, the movie is rarely funny. There is a good comedic turn by a firecracker salesman (Paul Goetz) with his “Get excited” commentary. SNL’s Kristen Wig is also funny as the donut franchise maestro.
The movie loses steam very quickly. Elizabeth Banks seems to be about as human as the doll in “Lars and the Real Girl” and the movie is slapped carelessly together. I’m not one to notice continuity errors, especially when I’m just trying to stay awake during bombs like “Meet Bill”. And yet, I couldn’t help but notice one of the worst continuity errors I’ve ever seen. Bill is eating a donut and is about one bite from finishing her off, and in the next cut the donut has only one bite in it. Stuff like that just throws me right out of the film. Later. after an accident, one character doesn’t if mention the accident or what happened to the injured character. I’m assuming they cut out scenes that didn’t work, because I can’t believe they didn’t write those scenes into the screenplay.
Jessica Alba as a lingerie shop employee is mildly passable, and Logan Lerman plays a good kid, but his character is poorly written. Even worse is the TV reporter Chip, a complete waste of Olyphant, who was good in movies such as “Go” and “Die Hard 4″.
In conclusion, by all means, do not “Meet Bill”.
