Movie Review: 'Easy Does It' is a Confused Homage to 70s Cinema

Easy Does It is a pointless meander through pretentious filmmaking homage couched in down home, redneck posing. Writer-director Will Addison sets out to critique the American dream via a dark comic crime/road movie and misses in just about every way you can imagine. Unfunny, downright dreary, at times, and visually chaotic, Easy Does It is a slog to get through as the story desperately searches for a point.

Ben Matheny and Matthew Paul Martinez star in Easy Does It as Jack and Scottie, a couple of going nowhere low lifes. Their main source of income appears to be bum fights in which they fight each other and one of them takes a dive so the other can take the prize. Unfortunately, they aren’t very good at this scam and end up running off without their prize. This is problematic as the two are indebted to ‘The King’ (Linda Hamilton), a small town, Mississippi criminal overlord.

A way out for Jack and Scottie arrives when Jack receives a postcard from his mother. Jack’s mom has died and claims to have left him something under a pier in California, where she’d taken Jack as a child. Jack believes that the gift may be some gold coins she’d promised him as a child. It’s possible that the coins could be a small fortune and thus Jack and Scottie’s ticket out of their troubles with the King.

But first, they need to escape the King. The King doesn’t necessarily buy into the idea that Jack and Scottie have a fortune waiting for them. Moreover, she doesn’t think they will return to pay their debt. The King sics her top henchmen, Blue (Susan Gordon), on our heroes and when they do manage to go on the run, Blue is never far behind. The other problem with the dreams of Cali-gold, they don’t have any money for gas.

The only answer that either Jack or Scottie can come up with is, straight up crime. At first, they just want to steal some gas but when that doesn’t work, they end up robbing the station and taking a hostage to boot. Poor, unfortunate, Collin (Cory Dumesnil) is in the wrong place at the wrong time and becomes the pair's permanent hostage. Naturally, Stockholm syndrome kicks in and Collin is soon as much in on the infamy as Jack and Scottie.

Whether there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or not, is not the point of Easy Does It. That’s because the movie doesn’t appear to have a point. Easy Does It is a road movie, a crime movie and a dark comedy but isn’t particularly good at being any one of these. Writer-Director Will Addison appears most interested in querying the American dream, something he does through the use of to the camera interviews with the cast, seemingly in character but apropos of nothing to the main story.

Characters appear in these vignettes speaking about whether or not they believe in the American dream even before they’ve been introduced to the main story and it creates a dissonant tone. Why are these scenes here? What is Easy Does It intended to say? Do the characters believe in the American Dream? Do they believe it is achievable? Who knows, not one of the characters has anything particularly insightful to say.

Linda Hamilton is a complete oddity in Easy Does It. She’s the top billed star on the poster but she has maybe 10 minutes of screen-time. The whole time she was on screen I could focus on nothing but the unfortunate choice of corn rows and men's suits as an aesthetic. Both Hamilton’s King George and Susan Gordon’s Blue are bending genders in Easy Does It but there doesn’t appear to be any point to their aesthetic other than it is colorful and different. Each actress gets to toy with accents and tics but nothing much is gained from these actorly bits of business.

The film features entirely unnecessary voice cameos from John Goodman and Harry Shearer. Both provide the voice of radio hosts with Goodman as a baseball announcer acting as Greek Chorus for the antics of Blue and Shearer is around for less than a minute to deliver exposition late in the 3rd act. Why are they here? Did they dash off these vocal cameos just hanging out in their living rooms?

Easy Does It is set in the 1970’s for no other reason than Director Addison likes to occasionally ape the look of the cult cinema of the 70’s. The costumes worn by Jack and Collin have a 70’s flavor but they could just as easily have been second hand store aesthetics popular with modern hipsters. Thus the period setting of Easy Does It is just as pointless as everything else in this hodgepodge of cinematic homage.

Director Will Addison likes to experiment with the look of his movie and from time to time, Easy Does It does have an interesting look to it. If the aesthetic talent on display were tied to a story that was more coherent, purposeful or darkly comic, as appears to have been the intent, perhaps we’d have something here. Sadly, Easy Does It never comes together. The story is meandering, the dark comedy is lazy and the artful touches are so far in left field as to be confounding.

Easy Does It arrives for on-demand rental on July 17th.