There’s a scene in Paul Feig’s new comedy, Boat!—which began streaming on Amazon Prime today—where Awkwafina uses a face-off machine to get a whole new face. If that line sounds familiar, congratulations: You have very good taste.
In fact, the “fighting machine” concept was a joke in Feig’s excellent 2015 comedy. Spyin a scene where Jason Statham’s dimwitted agent proposes that he simply “go into the face-off machine and get a whole new face” to complete his mission. (Statham’s character was probably thinking of a 1997 sci-fi film, Face/Out of Place.)
“Do you have any quarters?” the CIA chief, played by Allison Janney, asks. “Because they cost 50 cents.”
“What? I have to pay?” Statham replies.
“No, because it doesn’t exist!”
It’s an objectively perfect and funny exchange in an objectively perfect and funny movie. So, no doubt, Paul Feig fans will love to see this joke referenced in Boat!starring Awkwafina and John Cena in a dystopian comedy about a lottery that gives losers the chance to kill the lottery winner and claim the jackpot. The film, directed by Feig and written by Rob Yescombe, is set in the year 2030. Apparently, in the year 2030, the fighting machine does exist.
After accidentally winning the deadly lottery, Awkwafina is forced to flee from the bloodthirsty mob. And what better way to hide than with a brand new face? Boat!The device is called a “prosthetic machine.”
Awkwafina selects the face of an old man with a goatee, puts his head in the machine, et voila!
And yes, that moment is a knowing wink to Spy, Although Feig told Jugo Mobile in a recent interview that the idea was already in the script when he received it.
“We finally got the Face-Off machine to become a thing, which I’m very happy about,” Feig told Jugo Mobile. “That was in Rob Yescombe’s original script, and I thought it was hilarious to be able to do what we had talked about in Spy.”
As fun as those scenes are for audiences, Feig noted that wearing all those prosthetics wasn’t all that fun for his lead star.
“It was many, many hours in the makeup chair for her,” he said. “I’ve done stuff like that when I was an actor, and it’s really not fun. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s very hot. Then they’re like, ‘OK, we’re having lunch! ’ It’s like, ‘OK, thanks. I have to eat my lunch now with this thing on. ’ But she was a trooper. She did it.”
And presumably Awkwafina didn’t have to pay 50 cents.
