REVIEW: 2B or not 2B

Title: 2B

Director: Richard Kroehling

Running Time: 132 minutes

Major Actors: James Remar, Kevin Corrigan, Jane Kim,

Florencia Lozano, John Christian Plummer

2B or not 2B

I think everyone who watches 2B should experience the film the way I experienced it at the Cannes Film Festival, sleep deprived and with nothing better on any of the screens around. Here’s how to do it…

**How To Prepare To View 2B**

Step One: Eat a decent meal and use the bathroom. Any distraction at all gives you a reason to get up from your seat, and once you get up you are not coming back. Trust me.

Step Two-A: Bring a friend. Having someone to commiserate with increases the interest in the film and also the hilarity. Trading zingers keeps you alert and ready for when the nipple caps come up or for when they rip a line straight off George Carlin.

-or-

Step Two-B: Don’t bring a friend. You’ll be embarrassed enough that you sat and watched the whole film. If no one is around, you don’t have to remember it at all.

It never happened.

Step Three: Watch it late at night when there’s nothing better to do except maybe sleep. Viewing the film when slightly tired also helps make it funnier rather than sadder. Lines like, “Can I ask you a question?” and “Do you have a cunt?” are more acceptable when you’re too tired to care as much about the cinematic value of the film. I said more acceptable.

**Now, What to Expect…**

            If you were hoping to view a futuristic film about the rise of transbemans who will eventually replace the human race because they are better suited for a world of technology and don’t have any of the human follies, such as greed, hatred, or envy, the film will meet your expectations to some degree.

            If you were hoping to view an insightful or interesting film about the rise of transbemans who will eventually replace the human race, you will be a little more disappointed and possibly baffled by the next 132 minutes that follow the opening credits.

            Within the first few minutes of 2B, each major character appears on screen as their voiceover narrates their plans, their innermost desires, what their favorite color is, the name of their first childhood pet, their concerns on picking the winning lotto numbers, their deepest fears, what they had for breakfast, ad nauseam. The cheesy script is distracting enough, but coupled with the poor reaction shots of the characters, it becomes difficult to believe you are supposed to be watching a serious drama instead of a spoof of a serious drama.

            The disbelief heightens with the introduction of the man cave, where reclusive inventor, the eccentric Dr. Tom Mortlake (James Remar), resides in a sparse, stony mansion only decorated with a large leather armchair placed in the very center of the vacant space. He has created a serene atmosphere where he grows his transbemans - otherwise known as TRANSitional Bio Electronic huMANS - including a garden, and has even gone so far as to lay out a canopy bed for educational afternoon discussions with Mia about the Holocaust and other horrible tragedies in human history.

            Mia Mortlake (Jane Kim), Dr. Tom Mortlake’s first transbeman, has already grown to full adulthood and is noted as being incredibly attractive several too many times for comfort throughout the film. After Dr. Tom Mortlake instructs Mia to murder him on live broadcast that he somehow secures on all the televisions in the entire world from his house, he leaves directions for her to seek out Clay Konroy (Kevin Corrigan), a rogue indie journalist who has long since been scratched off the Pulitzer mailing list, in order for him to blog the story of their work in the realm of transbemans and the elusive Mindfile because he is the only man Dr. Tom Mortlake trusts to get the word out, for reasons that are never explained to the audience.

            An odd relationship forms between Mia and Clay, resulting in many more references to her attractiveness and questions as to why Dr. Tom Mortlake would make her female as opposed to male, not so subtly insinuating the possibility of creepy maker-transbeman sexual interactions. These insinuations turn into outright accusations by Clay, who insists, “Daddy didn’t make [her] just to hold [her] hands,” and also demands that she should definitely tell him if she has a cunt or not. In case you get curious to know simply because it is brought up on so many occasions in the first hour of the film, the status of Mia’s nether regions is never determined conclusively one way or another.

            At this point, the movie goes from, believe it or not, a somewhat mellow tone to a vulgar and shocking one. The dialogue takes off with a flood of obscenities, even with sweet, naïve Mia getting in on the action as she branches off from her previous orders from “Daddy” on never cursing unless she gives someone a dollar. I’m assuming the reasoning behind this is to show us that transbemans have personalities subject to change and that they are more human than robot, but the resulting effect instead is to make the viewer question whether these transbemans are really better than humans or if they are still subject to the same follies that wise Dr. Tom Mortlake was trying to avoid.

            A romantic element is thrown in nearly as an afterthought towards the end of the film as Mia and Clay share a kiss. Surprisingly, this does not occur during or following the conversation about Mia’s nether regions or about her father creating her as a pinnacle of female beauty. After spending most of the movie wondering not if, but when, Clay was going to take advantage of the opportunity to exercise his journalistic inquisitiveness, it was a bit surprising that they did not move beyond the one steamy sporadic kiss.

            The scene where Mia describes the transbeman birthing process is a strange one, not because it’s detailing the creation of a transbeman, but because they decide to cover only the nipples of Mia’s character while she floats in the birthing tank and “Daddy” pulls her from the water, an action dangerously close to appearing sensual. Kroehling kind of already “goes there,” what with his talk of cunts and motherfuckers and all, and now it seems like at this point he changes his mind yet again about the direction he wants his film to take. The waffling between the tones of the film is confusing because it doesn’t let viewers stay in one mindset. It’s hard to tell if Kroehling is trying to align his film with a thriller, suspense, erotic, or strict sci-fi genre, not that he should have to pick one and only one, but the quick change of pace is unsettling and dizzying for the audience.

            Many of the characters were simply not believable. The worst example, or perhaps the best example, of character unbelievability laid in the performance of Haley Dumond as Nicole St. John, a newscaster with an incredibly poor Southern accent. People go to school for years in order to perfect the neutral newscaster voice, but not Nicole St. John. She acts incredibly unprofessionally for a head newscaster and is given, according to the clips of the show shown during the film, an incredibly heavy amount of time on screen to spout nonsense at the camera.

            As the film comes to a close, the caricature of all women police officers, Detective Vicky Borano (Florencia Lozano), finds Mia and arrests her, telling her wryly that she “does not have the right to remain silent because [she] doesn’t have any rights,” and Clay drives somewhere out into the forest to desperately upload his blog to the Internet... in the remote forest... ? But I guess in a world with transbemans anything's possible, so Mia dons a gown akin to a hospital gown, except with a carefully placed slit right between her cleavage, yet another slight nod to her shapely form, and we watch as a council of what appear to be “experts” hold a court case over the Internet about what to do with her. At this point in the film, Kroehling has at least accomplished the task of getting us to suspend or disbelief to the point where we can expect that anything that can happen will happen, so when the police take Mia to a holding cell to lethally inject her and Clay goes out to Dr. Tom Mortlake’s woods to wait, though we never find out what for, we are infinitely surprised when the film simply ends with no bells and whistles attached.

            The aim of 2B to open the public’s eye to the quickening of technological advancements and to make us question what exactly makes us humans is a noble enough goal and an interesting topic. The painful dialogue and poor acting, however, overshadow the patchy moments of insight that were deep enough to fully address Kroehling’s concern for the future. The film becomes more like an exploration of a schizophrenic’s witness account of these events with the amount of times the film shifts in its approach of tackling the narrative. And so, when it comes to 2B or not 2B, we would have been better off if Richard Kroehling had never even asked the question.