I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell: Meet the Horrible Mr. Max

Tucker Max got famous through a Web site detailing how being an asshole to women constantly got him laid, making him a hero to frat boys and a demon to everyone else who noticed. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, adapted from his magnum opus/blog, is pretty damn odious, mostly because it wusses out. Hellseeks to deflect pre-emptive attacks on Tucker’s misogyny by basically ignoring him for the first half. Though he’s there as the party instigator (played by Matt Czuchry, who redeems the character’s written smugness not one bit), the focus is on nerdy pal Drew (Jesse Bradford). After a bitter breakup with a cheating ex, Drew is prone to randomly threatening to carve a “fuck-hole” into any and all women who approach him until he meets a stripper (Marika Dominczyk) who can beat him at Halo. In the second half, Max realizes his sins (against his friends, not women) and redeems himself by hijacking another buddy’s wedding for a long, rambling confessional. Hell—Bob Gosse’s first film in 11 years since Niagara, Niagara—is visually incompetent to a painful extreme and almost never funny, but worst of all it doesn’t have the courage of Max’s unadulterated convictions. If you’re going to offend the easily offended, at least go big.