Laughs: 10/10
Story: 7/10
Cinematography: 8/10
The Sugar: The kind you'd find in a good sweet tea
The Sulphur: Sulphur
The Bottom Line: Mystery Team is the funniest movie I've seen in a while. See this tonight.
I went into this movie knowing there was a lot of potential for disappointment. Derrick Comedy might be the best sketch comedy troupe on the internet. They're my favorite, in any case. But up until Mystery Team, everything they'd ever done together had been under ten minutes, and I was scared that they wouldn't pull off the transition from short-form to feature-length. But they stepped up like champs and made something that's more rewarding than, and at least as funny as (if not funnier than) their best internet sketches.
As children, the Mystery Team, that is, Jason (Donald Glover), Duncan (DC Pierson), and Charlie (Dominic Dierkes) became local celebrities by solving Hardy Boys-style mysteries around their small New Hampshire town. Now that they're seniors in high school, everyone around them has grown up, but they're still exactly the same. No one takes them seriously, of course, because their exploits, vocabularies, and interests (at least at the start) are still those of children. But when a young girl asks the Mystery Team to investigate the murder of her parents, Jason sees a golden opportunity for the team to regain credibility. And it doesn't hurt that the young girl's older sister just made Jason realize that girls aren't icky. )After all, what would a detective caper be without a good-lookin' dame?) As you'd expect, the three boys are in way over their heads, even more so than the average high schoolers would be investigating a double homicide. And that's where most of the humor comes from in this movie.
And it most definitely is humorous. You will laugh. Alot. I laughed so frequently and loudly that I felt like a crazy person watching it by myself. I should mention that, even though this is a movie with three very child-like protagonists, this is not a movie for children. It's got more than its fair share of cursing and sex jokes, and there's a bit of violence, nudity, and scatological humor (think Trainspotting but played for laughs) thrown in there for good measure. But the whole crux of this movie and its humor is the way a few very naive characters get thrown into a very grown-up world.
The Derrick Comedy bunch also deserves some credit for their writing. There's a very common pitfall among feature films made by sketch comedians. Namely, they have a difficult time integrating their humor into a coherent story. You know what I'm talking about. You'll be watching the movie and then all of a sudden it seems like the plot gets put on pause for five minutes so the performers can go into a sketch. Even geniuses like Abbot & Costello and the Monty Python guys often fell into this trap. And while I'm not suggesting that the Derrick crew is on the same level as those legends, they did manage to avoid this trap; the humor in Mystery Team flows pretty organically from the plot.
And Eckman deserves props for directing and editing. I can tell you from my own experience, it's really difficult to wear both of those hats. Often, making the best editing decision for the movie overall requires scrapping footage that took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the part of the director to get. And when you, as the director, are also editing, it can be really tough to have to kill your baby, so to speak. Looking at the deleted scenes on the DVD, I can tell that Eckman had a ton of hilarious improv footage that he must have felt very tempted to include in his movie. But, for the most part, he had the resolve to cut some bits short in order to keep the plot moving at a good pace. Also, Austin F. Schmidt did a nice job photographing this movie. I found the glow effect a little much at times, but overall his shot choices were surprisingly elegant.
All in all, this is a movie I would immediately recommend to my friends. But if you're not sure whether Derrick Comedy's brand of humor will rub you the right way, here's one of their internet sketches:
If you found that funny, then you have to see Mystery Team tonight.
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