Movie Review: Cheap Thrills (2013)

By Tristan Bishop

Films tend to say a lot about the climate in which they were made – from the nuclear paranoia of 1950s creature features to the Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib atrocities many claim had an influence on torture porn/ordeal horror. The horror film especially lends itself to reflecting the fears of its audience, whether this is the intention of the film-makers or not, and so, with the increasingly bleak financial outlook of global recession, we are now beginning to see films which reflect people’s fear of poverty. For instance, this week I saw both Martin Scorcese’s tour-de-force The Wolf Of Wall Street, inspired by the Occupy movement in its examination of the excesses of real life stockbroker Jordan Belfort and Cheap Thrills – which deals with extremes of wealth and poverty in a very different way.

E.L. Katz’s début film as a director (he had previously collaborated with Adam Wingard as writer/producer on several features) has as its central character Craig (played by Pat Healy), a man struggling to support his wife and child on his meagre mechanic’s salary. Upon learning that he is to be laid off he takes a detour to the local bar to drown his sorrows, when he chances upon his old school friend Vince (Ethan Embry), whom he has not seen in five years. Vince is doing a little better than Craig, but works as a debt collector, and isn’t above a little of the old strong-arm tactics. They are invited to sit and chat to an obviously well-off couple – The loud, gregarious Colin (an excellent performance by David Koechner), who snorts coke off any available surface, and the beautiful but quiet Violet, who seems more interested in her phone than being out at what we’re told is her birthday celebration.

Colin likes to bet, however. He starts off by offering twenty dollars to whoever can down a shot of tequila first, and this escalates until a disastrous strip club visit where Craig gets knocked out by a bouncer after being dared to slap a stripper’s arse. When Craig comes round they are in Violet’s luxurious house, where the party is just getting started, the drugs and alcohol are flowing, and Colin’s bets are about to get a lot more outrageous, perhaps even dangerous.

The message of Cheap Thrills is pretty simple – The rich exploit the poor, and retain control over them by pitting them against each other. Divide and rule, oldest trick in the book. It’s by no means a subtle commentary on our times. In fact, not much about Cheap Thrills is subtle at all – as befits the title of the film, there’s swearing, sex, violence, assorted moments of gross-out comedy and drugs. Lots of drugs. In fact watching the film sometimes makes you feel like you’ve attended the wrong party and been force-fed lots of substances that are working together to make you feel rather off-colour, and you would really just like to go home and hide under a duvet. The genius of this, of course, is that the film is putting you straight into the mindset of Craig and Vince, right into their ordeal, but the downside is that, well, you might just feel a bit queasy and want to hide under a duvet. There’s no light relief; even the laughs come at the nastiest moments in the film, and even though at the start we have some sympathy for Craig, this soon dissipates. The film appears to be trying to make us question our own behaviours and the limits we would go to for money, but the lack of a sympathetic character means it just ends up being nasty people doing nasty things to each other.

This doesn’t mean it’s a bad film by any means, however – the aforementioned druggy energy, nasty laughs and solid performances make it an entertaining enough watch, which is a shame, as it had the potential to be so much more.

Cheap Thrills will be released in the US on March 21st 2014.