Last week, the new comedy Don Peyote hit iTunes and VOD, and today the film will be released in some select theaters.
Warren Allman (Dan Fogler) is a 33-year-old unemployed graphic novelist who has no ambitions, no political leanings, and lots of time on his hands—which he spends smoking marijuana and swapping conspiracy theories with friends. He is engaged to Karen (Kelly Hutchinson), his girlfriend of 3 years, who is anxious to have a baby as her biological clock ticks down.
One day Warren encounters a homeless man on the street, who is preaching the end of the world on 12/21/2012. Warren becomes obsessed with the apocalypse and the Mayan prediction of the end of the world. He finds his new mission in life—to interview “experts” on the subject and create a documentary about his findings. This mission soon becomes an overwhelming obsession, taking over his life both in his dreams and in reality. Meanwhile, his fiance is trying to plan their wedding, and believes that Warren is spending his time looking for a proper job.
The film has an amazing cast of guest stars, including Anne Hathaway, Jay Baruchel, Josh Duhamel, Topher Grace, Wallace Shawn, Annabella Sciorra and Dean Winters. Overall, I thought the performances were good but the script, on the other hand, was just awful. I have seen a lot of positive praise about this film across Twitter, but I just didn’t get it. I found the movie to be so incoherent and hard to follow. It was like you needed to have partaken in an extracurricular substance in order to enjoy what was going on.
The film felt very much like a low budget independent film, where a guy got together a bunch of his friends, turned on the camera and hoped something decent came about. The entire film is narrated (I believe by Fogler himself) like a documentary, but the movie itself is all over the place—and even breaks into a Bollywood-like dance sequence at one point. About halfway through the film, I was about ready to give up, but stuck through it, and found the second half slightly better. There was one scene where Warren breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges the viewing audience. This cuts to a scene with Glavin (Topher Grace), “Dan Fogler’s agent”, saying “he wrote it, so it’s no one one’s fault but his own”. And that pretty much summed it up.
I watched the film via an online screener, so I cannot really comment on the quality of the audio or video presentation, but I did think the special effects looked decent.
Overall, I was really disappointed with the film. I really wanted to enjoy it—from the trailer it looked like the movie would be fun, and the cast sounded great, but I just found the story and script to be a bit of a mess.
