Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With my Sailor Moon journey almost completed and my housemate having returned from vacation, these last two weeks have seen us charging through a new Netflix arrival, the intriguing format blend that is Kevin Can Fuck Himself. The show combines three-camera sitcom and single-camera drama styles to a variety of interesting effects, and left me with a pile of thoughts for you all. We also indulged in some classic comfort food, checking out both a questionable Dolph Lundgren vehicle and a superior Argento feature. We’ve got lots of thoughts to get through, so let’s dive right into the Week in Review!
First up this week was Showdown in Little Tokyo, a ‘91 buddy cop feature starring Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee as L.A. cops facing off with the Iron Claw yakuza clan. Along the way, they’ll participate in some reverse-Rush Hour culture clash shenanigans, with Lundgren’s Japanese upbringing and Lee’s American machismo making for some frankly tepid back-and-forth. And ultimately, they will have to take down the Iron Claw’s leader, played by the always-welcome Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa of Mortal Kombat fame.
Showdown in Little Tokyo is about as pure of a “Mac movie” as I can imagine, meaning it’s the kind of feature beloved by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s masculinity-obsessed Mac. Lundgren’s stoic affect and absurd combat proficiency verges on self-parody, but he’s got such a winning charisma that he manages to sell it with that winking Schwarzenegger energy. Lee doesn’t fare as well; though it’s billed as a buddy cop film, he’s really more a sidekick than a partner here, prone to offering flattering absurdities like “I gotta say, you have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen.” And of course, Tagawa is always excellent, chewing the scenery as eagerly here as in his various fighting game and comic book adaptations.
The feature is confidently inconsequential, which I don’t tend to consider a fault, but sadly lacks the staging and choreography strengths that would earn it a solid recommendation. Lundgren and Lee are both talented fighters, but they are given little here to work with; their fights are basically just brawls scattered with high kicks, lacking the physical poetry of a great action or martial arts feature. It’s quite endearing seeing Lundgren evoke a mixture of “hey babe” machismo and samurai philosophy, but with the action scenes underwhelming, Showdown in Little Tokyo is more intriguing artifact than winning formula.
We then checked out Tenebrae, an ‘82 Dario Argento feature starring Anthony Franciosa as Peter Neal, an acclaimed writer of murder-mystery fiction. While promoting his new book in Rome, Neal becomes embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer who seems inspired by the violence featured in his novels. With bodies piling up, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur, as the power our stories hold over society are called into question.
Having made his reputation on giallo murder-mystery features, Argento then turned to outright fantasy horror for the magnificent Suspiria and Inferno. Tenebrae served as his return to the genre that made him, and was actually inspired by real-life accusations regarding the psychological consequences of his violent tales, culminating in genuine death threats. As such, when Peter Neal is asked about why he feels the need to “punish deviancy” through his fiction, it’s basically Argento offering the exasperated answer of “why do you think I agree with my stories’ villains?”
Tenebrae’s metatextual frustration is one of its most compelling features, but there’s plenty else to enjoy in Argento’s confident return home. His eye for inherently menacing physical geography is as keen as ever; Tenebrae features plenty of the slow-burning traversals of hallways, basements, and alienating city streets that give features like Suspiria such an air of menace, even if the lighting design lacks his fantasy features’ otherworldly affect. Several members of Goblin also return to score the film, resulting in a number of standout sequences driven entirely by menacing melodies, with the camera only offering a suggestion of violence. And several kill sequences stand out, with one featuring John Saxon impressing through its ability to foster horror in spite of taking place in a brightly lit city square. I was actually reminded of The Conversation, which similarly coated a bustling city plaza in a veil of secrecy and menace.
If Tenebrae lacks for anything, it is focus and momentum. In spite of the overarching drive to catch the killer, there’s little active investigation here; the killer just does what he will while the other players mill about fruitlessly, meaning the film can often feel a touch aimless. The metatextual layer is also so prominent it somewhat undercuts the textual drama; I never felt as afraid for Neal or his associates as I did for the players in Phenomena or Deep Red, because they felt more like positions in an academic argument than people. And finally, while there are standouts, the kills here can’t match the consistency of ingenuity or beauty in his absolute strongest features. Still, all of this is to say that Argento is basically just competing with himself at this point; Tenebrae is an altogether excellent production.
Alongside our film viewings, we also screened the two seasons of Kevin Can Fuck Himself, a distinctive genre blend that recently hopped from AMC+ to Netflix. Annie Murphy stars as Allison McRoberts, the fatigued and browbeaten wife of the titular Kevin. Kevin’s life is framed as a three-camera sitcom modeled pretty explicitly after Kevin Can Wait; he is a boisterous, ever-quipping man-child who rules the living room with his father and best friend, forever scheming and engaging in fresh antics with his closest buddies. Allison’s role in his show is to be the perpetually nagging wife; but when she closes the door of his domain, the lighting shifts to muted tones, the cinematography swerves to single-camera drama, and wacky shenanigans are are replaced with the overbearing question of how she can escape her horrible, horrible life.
The show’s gimmick is a clever conceptual flourish built out of a fundamental emotional truth: the men who dominate a certain brand of classic American sitcom are actually abusive, manipulative monsters, and any life constructed in the periphery of their megalomania is bound to be impoverished by their presence. While Kevin engages in episodic shenanigans like “competing with my best friend in a chili cook-off,” Allison discovers he’s wasted their life savings, has difficulty reconnecting with returning friends, and ultimately swerves into a Breaking Bad-reminiscent plot to outright kill her husband. Schemes escalate, more objects escape Kevin’s gravity, and the central contrast of genre just barely holds through two seasons of contrasting the twin worlds of Kevin and Allison.
I’ll admit, when I first started watching this show, my immediate reaction was “this should probably be a movie.” And frankly, after two seasons, I still think it should have been a movie; the showrunners find some interesting wrinkles in their episodic conceits, but the concept just cannot support full seasons of earnest emotional drama. As a result, there’s a whole bunch of circling and false starts regarding the “kill Kevin” plan, new characters are introduced just to stir the pot, and the core relationships of Kevin, Allison, and their neighbor Patty are padded out to emotionally deleterious effect.
Interestingly, through this process of dragging out the drama, a secondary, likely unintentional takeaway emerges: the similar unreality of Allison’s Breaking Bad world, which is no less crowd-aimed or formulaic than Kevin’s, in spite of its lack of a laugh track. Prestige dramas don’t actually depict reality; they depict a dramatically heightened reality packaged into forty minute narratives, wherein characters almost always escalate situations, conversations lack the middle ground of light communication separating functional discussion and emotional catharsis, and end-of-the-world threats arrive only to be neatly dispatched before the credits roll. Through directly contrasting Kevin and Allison’s worlds, Kevin Can Fuck Himself seemingly accidently articulates why I don’t tend to find American “prestige TV” dramas particularly interesting; they are designed to be an endlessly replicable sequence of self-serious forty minute thrillers, and that simply doesn’t appeal to me.
Still, there’s plenty else to enjoy here, particularly in the excellent performances of Annie Murphy, Mary Hollis Inboden (Patty), and Eric Petersen (Kevin). Petersen does a flawless and thankless job of embodying the grotesquery that is the classic sitcom dad, wielding his endless confidence and genuine charisma with ruthless proficiency, all while appearing to “just say what everybody’s thinking.” The surface texture of “group-driving wacky shenanigans” eroding into a clear portrait of manipulation and abuse is the show’s most effective long-term project; it is easy to see how Kevin exploits an assumption of group consent to keep his victims in line, and richly satisfying to watch as one after another of his one-time collaborators realize their life would be better off without this hateful, narcissistic man at its center.
As for Murphy and Inboden, their chemistry is excellent in spite of both of them portraying awkward, antisocial people, and Inboden’s deadpan delivery is responsible for many of the show’s best lines. I was also quite taken with the emergent life philosophy espoused by the two of them, as they attempt to find solace in the wreckage left by either a surplus or absence of personal ambition. Even allegedly serious dramas often place a premium on some hope of “escaping all this and becoming our best selves somewhere else” – Kevin Can Fuck Himself understands such hopes are not just unrealistic, they can often lead to total dissatisfaction with the lives we’re actually living. With its protagonists pushing forty and the future looking a whole lot like the past, the show instead offers a philosophy of moderate hopes and minor victories. “I don’t want to reinvent myself. This should be enough. I should be enough,” Allison at one point declares. Meanwhile, Patty dreams of “smoking a cigarette on my front steps without worrying about somebody else’s problems.” Their hard-fought pride in being themselves felt quietly profound to me, a necessary counterbalance to the aspirational false assurance of so much television drama. If we can escape the Kevins of the world, we’ll probably turn out all right.
