Review of Botched

Botched (I) (2007)
2/10
Not for me at all.
20 June 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Botched starts as Ritchie (Stephen Dorf) is involved in a car accident after just having robbed an auction house of valuable diamonds, not wanting to be arrested Ritchie flees the accident sans the diamonds. Mr. Groznyl (Sean Pertwee) who Ritchie works for is not happy that he lost the diamonds but decides to give Ritchie one more chance, he orders Ritchie to go to Moscow & steal an ancient gold Crucifix. However things again go wrong & Ritchie finds himself trapped on a skyscraper floor with two of Groznyl's men & a bunch of hostages as he tries to figure out what to do in order to get out of the building alive & without being arrested but there is someone else there too, a psycho killer who starts to kill everyone off...

This German, Irish, British & American co-production was directed by Kit Ryan & seems to be one of those films that divides opinion, some seem to love it's bizarre sense of humour & madcap plot while other's like me think it's a complete mess that fails at everything it sets out to do. I heard lots of views that that say there's lots of twists but I thought the story was predictable & the ending in particular was an unclear mess that was too eager to get the two main male & female leads together. I heard many people say that Botched is funny & again I just can't see it, the humour is so obvious & poorly staged that there's more laughs during the average funeral. The whole film is terrible, the plot is just rubbish, the gore is minimal & the so-called comedy is just awful. I don't think I laughed once. The character's are silly one dimensional idiots, there are plot holes galore & there's even a terrible ending, the story, the character's & villains are just not engaging enough. The whole thing plays like a cross between a gangster flick like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), a bare-bones slasher flick & some madcap Police Academy farce where stupid character's get into stupid situations & the whole thing just escalates, or so the makers would have hoped. Unfortunately the gangster elements are poor & barely figure, the horror elements amount to a few silly death's & the comedy is just so unfunny. So what we have is Botched a horror comedy where both the horror & comedy is of the poorest sort. I saw it on telly for free & I still feel ripped-off.

This is quite well made although the constant grey corridors get boring. There's no real excitement & there's definitely no scares, tension or suspense as the silly moronic comedy is so distracting & in your face. The gore isn't even all that, someones head if chopped off, there's spikes through feet, a fridge of guts, dead bodies hanging up, a chopped off hand gag & a decent amount of fake blood but Botched never really goes for it in either the horror or gore department.

Apparently shot in Ireland & in Russia the film looks nice enough with good production values. The acting is terrible, the accents are beyond irritating & annoying & look closely at leading Man Stephen Dorf because he looks totally bewildered at what's going on with a sort of stoned look on his face in most scenes. A special mention goes to Jaime Foreman who has to have put in the worst single performance in a film I have seen in a long time.

Botched is what it says it is, a totally botched attempt at a modern madcap horror crime gangster comedy that was terrible on all counts. Some people seem to like it & that's fair enough but for me Botched was awful.
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