Boat (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) brings together two of the funniest people currently cracking jokes in film: Awkwafina (coming off a role inspired by the very funny Lady of the contest) and John Cena (which was funny enough to make me sympathize with him a little). Ricky Stanicky). They are the axis of an action comedy directed by Paul Feig. Bridesmaids fame, but let’s be realistic here: Boat it’s not Bridesmaids (nor is it SpyThe potential is there for this quasi-satirical, rather stupid and violent joke to provoke much laughter and booing, although the concept is one thing and the execution is another, and unfortunately I lean more towards “other.”
BOAT!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: The year is 2030. The Great Depression of 2026 inspired the state of California to create a lottery with a gigantic cash prize, but here’s the catch: it’s totally legal to murder the person holding the winning ticket and keep the money. The only rules? No guns allowed and you have to kill them before nightfall. We learn all this in the opening credits, which conclude with this devastating line: “Some people call it dystopian, but those people aren’t funny.” Get it? DON’T HAVE FUN, and if you don’t laugh at this movie’s barrage of jokes, you’re obviously a fucking party pooper!
Now we meet Katie Kim (Awkwafina), who has just moved back to Los Angeles. She’s a former child star hoping to make a comeback in acting—some remember her as the girl from the Spaghetti Squares commercial. Her mother recently passed away, and she has a little money in her pocket, but that’s about it. It’s a nothing-to-lose situation. She rents a dingy room from Shadi (Ayden Mayeri), who, of course, is a lunatic with big, dodgy eyes. Katie wakes up to find her clothes covered in liquid poop, and ends up borrowing from Shadi a head-to-toe gold ensemble that makes Katie look like the mini Oscar statuette her mother gave her as a good luck charm, only a little bigger. Why is this an important detail? I’ll get to that. Patience, please, and you’ll need it, as this movie runs 106 minutes when it should be a mere 89.
Katie goes to a horrifying audition in her mid-2000s rapper outfit and notices that Shadi’s lottery ticket is in the pocket. Of course, it’s the winner and it’s worth a record-breaking $3.6 billion and Katie accidentally activates it with her fingerprint and that’s when the crazy action begins and plot holes start to open up like giant cracks during a 9.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. The population comes at her with butcher knives, axes, and karate chops, and she’s forced to fight her way through a variety of ridiculous settings: a martial arts dojo, a yoga studio, a wax museum, Machine Gun Kelly’s house, etc. She does have some help, though, and this is where John Cena comes in, playing Noel, a hotshot freelance security agent who helps lottery winners live to see the sunset in exchange for a 10 percent cut of the prize.
Now, you’re probably wondering, why doesn’t Noel just kill her and keep the billions for himself? Because he’s a good human being, that’s why. Not everyone in this stupid movie is a selfish, murder-capable jerk! Katie and Noel engage in loads of violence and pranks and wherever the two meet, and just when it all starts to fall apart, Simu Liu pops into the plot as Louis Lewis, a former colleague of Noel’s who runs a huge, lottery-winning corporate security organization. Louis has fleets of muscles at his service, and that’s why he takes 30 percent. It seems like a whole cottage industry has sprung up around this lottery business. America! Capitalism! Now more than ever!
What movies will it remind you of? Boat is The Purge crossed with Idiocracy is located, I don’t know, Lucky numbers? It could happen to you? Jerry and Marge grow up?
Performance worth watching: Awkwafina and Cena are those rare, fun characters who are often the best parts in mediocre or bad movies. Putting them both in the same movie is an inspired idea in theory, but in reality, this material doesn’t do it for them. Boat It won’t limit anyone’s admiration for them, but jokes don’t always land the way they should.
Memorable dialogue: Rather than ruin one of the best lines, here’s one of Awkwafina’s middling comments: “At least the neighborhood is perse, it smells like shit and piss.”
Sex and skin: Just a bit of crude talk.
Our opinion: In BoatAwkwafina and Cena take a backseat to all the chaos. A losing move! Feig has proven capable of cultivating a strong sense of back-and-forth comedic timing and one-liners, but action is his weak point. He seems to be aiming for the manic energy of a Jackie Chan movie or a David Leitch one (see: Deadpool 2, The scapegoat), but its lackluster execution of the action sequences leaves one more impressed than amused. There are foot and wheel chases, knife fights, fisticuffs, Looney Tunes-style slapstick, and a fair amount of stomping, and it’s all incredibly violent. Kudos to Feig for finding a plot loophole that allows him to avoid the clichés of gunfights, but otherwise, none of this is particularly memorable.
Everything else in the film exists in a degree of -assiness: half-baked characters, half-baked concept, half-baked themes. Our beloved lead couple work with three or four broadly defined likeable characteristics between them, making them joke-throwing machines working off a 50/50 hit-miss script. The death lottery idea comes across as sloppy, lazy nonsense, and while we’re not here to evaluate its conceptual soundness, we do are I’m here for a bit of an escape from reality, not a deep pe into the human condition. All these plot holes tend to distract from the barrage of gags. And thematically, Feig and screenwriter Rob Yescombe aren’t sure whether they want to play with movie-world satire, create a perverse parody of capitalism, or explore the ugliest components of human behavior for a black comedy. This movie is a mess. And then it ends with the old bloopers and outtakes over the credits, insisting that what we just saw was funnier than we remember. It wasn’t! Sorry!
Our calling: Boat It inspires more than a few laughs, something that’s impossible when Cena and Awkwafina are front and center. But it’s ultimately disappointing and doesn’t make the most of its talented cast. So DON’T WATCH IT unless you’re really desperate for a few laughs.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
