Guy X (2005)
Director: Saul Metzstein
Cast: Jason Biggs, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Northam, Michael Ironside
First Look Pictures
On-sale: Nov. 27, 2007

Geeks Of Doom sent an email to the staff about movie screeners. The items on the list were about aliens, SpongeBob, and a little movie called Guy X that caught my eye, all because of one little name. His name is one name that I know very well. I stuck by him when he stuck his crank in a pie, and I cheered him on in that Freddie Prinze, Jr. bullshit called Boys and Girls. I watched him in the very depressing Prozac Nation and I once made sweet hot DeFrancisco love to his Anything Else co-star Christina Ricci. I even sat through Loser just to for him!

You guys know him by now. The name is Biggs, Jason Biggs, and he’s here to sleep with your cousin.

But even the godly reincarnation that is Jason Biggs couldn’t save a movie like Guy X. It’s not so much horrible, but at times it is either boring or tiring. It begins with a good start, and hell, I even laughed at a few of those scenes. But a half-hour like that, it loses my interest with a very slow and a very uncontrollable pace. Just a couple of minor adjustments to Guy X and it would have been a great movie, not boring and pretty interesting.

A plane drops Private Rudy Spurance (God”¦ I mean Jason Biggs) in a United States military base in Greenland. But then Spurance does a Dante Hicks and says”¦ I’M NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE! And it’s true, he’s not. Actually, he’s supposed to be stationed south in Hawaii. After landing, mosquitoes start biting him and he looks like an acne-faced teenager. The other soldiers start making fun of him for the little dance he does while he’s getting bit, which ends him up into the hospital on base.

And while the other soldiers are making fun of him, they start calling him by the name of Martin Pederson. Trying to convince them that he’s not Pederson, he gets laughed at. He tries to break out numerous times but every time his plot is foiled by Sergeant Irene (Natascha McElhone), who is under the command of Colonel Woolwrap (Jeremy Northam)”¦ who she’s currently dating as well.

At the base, they show Invasion of the Body Snatchers like it’s the best movie ever and they run their own newsletter, which Rudy gets involved with. While snooping around in some underground and very secret medical room, Rudy meets a man named Guy X (Michael Ironside), and from there, Guy X turns from a black comedy into a conspiracy thriller.

That might even be fine. Hell, I love conspiracy thrillers. I still have a boner over V for Vendetta and it gets better every single time I watch it. But all of my readers know how I hate it when films go back and forth from being one genre to another. Guy X is one of those films. It can’t decide what genre it wants to be, and it switches back and forth throughout the flick. There is no way that Saul Metzstein can let us know which part in the movie is which genre.

But hell, there is even ANOTHER genre involved and it’s the most obvious one. Every war movie released from 1995 and on just has to have a romantic subplot. It won’t be interesting without the subplot, you know? (That was sarcasm). The romantic subplot here is between Biggs’ and McElhone’s characters. If they dropped it, the movie would have been so much better”¦ and so much shorter. It takes up a lot of the movie’s time just telling us about it.

But Guy X is performance solid. Jason Biggs rocks. I can’t even explain how great he is. If there was one reason to see Guy X it would be this guy. How he hasn’t received an Oscar nomination is beyond me. Aside from when she’s lovey-dovey over Bigg’s character, McElhone does a decent job. Looks aside, she has the role down brilliantly. She’s one of those girls that have the looks but just needs a little bit of a boost on the acting.

The first-half, before it gets into the romantic stuff and conspiracy theory, works. Guy X has been influenced Robert Altman’s classic M*A*S*H. I would have even liked to see a movie where it was just Biggs settling down at his new location. That probably would have worked better. You could have even thrown in a romantic subplot and it would have made more sense why it was there. But Guy X is based on the book No One Thinks Of Greenland written by John Griesemer, so dropping a conspiracy plot like that wouldn’t work. Or it could always be a movie by itself. That would have worked.

Guy X could have been much better, but it’s not entirely that bad. A little bit of changes and Guy X would have gained another star. Nice try though.

** out of ****

Assets
http://specialopsmedia.com/assets/FirstLook/GuyX/Assets.zip (DVD Box Art, Production Notes)