Whipped - Movie Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

The time is the present, and the setting is New York: where everyone has game... or at least thinks they do. Brad (Brian Van Holt) thinks he's got game but is really an unabashedly sexist pig. Zeke (Zorie Barber) thinks he's got game but all he has are physical shortcomings. Jonathan (Jonathan Abrahams) knows he doesn't have game, but is forced to ante up stories as if he did because Zeke and Brad constantly brag over Sunday breakfasts about how they scammed during the week. And Eric (Judah Domke), a man who was designed to "jump on the grenade" at parties and ended up marrying the grenade, just wants to escape from his utterly pitiful life.

Enter into the story Mia (Amanda Peet), a girl who appears to be innocent but who we quickly discover to be playing all sides against the middle. Mia meets Brad, Zeke, and Jonathan one week, then schedules dates for the next week, only to be surprised by all three on the same night. Knowing that she is found out, she decides that it will be impossible to do a relationship with any single one of them because she likes them all too much and offers them the choice of each one having a relationship with her or having them all leave. Because all of them are too cocky to let Mia go, they all end up dating her... alternating nights, bumping into each other on the way out, and generally growing to hate each other rather quickly.

This is about a half hour into the movie, and the remaining hour and fifteen minutes are spent poking fun at the trio of headstrong men who are too dumb to realize what we do immediately: that Mia is a player.

Combining great dialogue with toilet humor (and I mean toilet literally), Whipped is something like watching a hybrid of Sex and the City, Swingers, and There's Something About Mary. And, like all of them, it is destined for greatness. In fact, the best way to describe whipped is as the second coming of Swingers, except this time the girls come out on top.

Fully aware of its status as a sex comedy, Whipped never takes itself too seriously. Instead, Whipped whips up a batch of great laughs combined with a light touch of satire. Peet plays the same perky, sexy girl that we so easily fell in love with in The Whole Nine Yards, and writer-director-producer Peter M. Cohen handles the film like he had been directing since birth.

The films flaws come in two aspects. One is that the movie is done in a sort of documentary format, showing clips of each man talking to the camera (and, as is suggested towards the end, talking to Mia behind the camera). The other is that the men are overdrawn in their actions. They overact their parts until they become nothing more than charicatures, and when that happens, the satire starts to become too heavy for such a light film.

Yet Whipped is ungodly funny. How funny? Let's just say I'm whipping out my wallet to pay for a ticket when it comes out.

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.

Facts and Figures

Year: 1999

Run time: 82 mins

In Theaters: Friday 1st September 2000

Box Office USA: $3.8M

Distributed by: Destination Films

Reviews

Contactmusic.com: 4 / 5

Rotten Tomatoes: 13%
Fresh: 9 Rotten: 59

IMDB: 4.4 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director: Peter M. Cohen

Producer: Peter M. Cohen

Screenwriter: Peter M. Cohen

Starring: Amanda Peet as Mia, Jonathan Abrahams as Jonathan

Also starring: Judah Domke, Zorie Barber, Peter M. Cohen