Harnett sacrifices pleasure for bet in ‘40 days’
Any movie with multiple boner jokes can’t be all bad.
Likewise, Miramax’s newest release “40 Days and 40 Nights” isn’t without its merits.
“40 Days” revolves around Matt Sullivan, a 20-something graphic designer in San Francisco who develops a not-so-common problem — too much action.
Sullivan, played by Josh Hartnett of “Pearl Harbor” and “The Virgin Suicides,” is quite popular with the ladies. Sometimes he accommodates a different girl more than once a week. But, when Sullivan gets word that his most recent ex has become engaged, his sex life takes a turn for the worse.
A series of troubling mid-coitus hallucinations prompt Matt to abandon “all sex-like things” for the duration of Lent, the 40-day season of self-deprivation for Catholics. Barely through the first week of his vow, he meets the hottie of his dreams. Hilarity ensues.
A prime example of gimmick comedy, “40 Days” has all the value, and most of the plot, of Jim Carrey’s 1997 comedy “Liar, Liar.” That comparison bodes well for “40 Days,” as “Liar, Liar” went down as one of that year’s funniest and most profitable movies.
Anyone could break this dynamic down. The lead character develops a habit, i.e., excessive lying or fornicating, which makes for intense comedy in the beginning scenes. When that habit begins to have a detrimental effect on his life, the character is confronted with a condition preventing him from continuing in the same dreadful, yet funny, way.
This condition provides for a feature-length series of laughable scenes and ironic situations during which the character struggles to reconcile his old ways with his new ones. Delirious from laughing at these scenes, the audience doesn’t notice or care about the lame resolution.
Hartnett performs well in a role that must have been written for Freddie Prinze Jr. in “40 Days.” He shows he can reel in big laughs without flexing any acting muscle at all. The film only asks him for a believable dumb face to bookend sequences involving his delusional state of mind as the 40 days draw on. Luckily, Hartnett does for the dumb face what Jack Nicholson did for the skewed eyebrow.
While “40 Days” does bring up an interesting issue of sexual politics and gender, the idea doesn’t last long before being poked out of focus by one of Hartnett’s errant boners. Any attempt at challenging gender roles is immediately nullified when director Michael Lehmann reverts back to plan A: alternating T&A with jokes about T&A.
With the exception of Hartnett and love interest Erica, played by Shannyn Sossamon of “A Knight’s Tale,” all the characters function along time-honored gender guidelines. Every man in the film, including Sullivan’s priest brother, is a shameless horndog and every woman is a deceitful, ill-intentioned sex kitten bent on luring Matt out of celibacy. However, as stereotypical as these portrayals may be, they serve Lehmann’s simplistic intentions to a very comical end.
“40 Days” is aimed at an older, more experienced crowd. Almost every joke revolves at least indirectly around sex or a sex act. This movie is full of gross-out humor, sexual sight gags, and verbal obscenities. Right on!
Grant Widmer