Accidental Love

Accidental Love

He appeals to mainstream tastes without having to compromise his off-kilter depictions of humanity with all its flaws.

His record speaks for itself: beginning in 2010, David O. Russell has released three movies “The Fighter,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle” that grossed a total of $380 million and earned 25 Academy Award nominations.

But there was a time when Russell couldn’t buy a break. Shooting on the political satire then-titled “Nailed,” loosely based on Al Gore’s daughter Kristin Gore’s 2004 novel “Sammy’s Hill,” shut down four times in 2008 because financing dried up. He ultimately quit the unfinished movie two years later, ceding control of it to others, and had his name removed from the credits.

Rechristened “Accidental Love” and credited to the pseudonymous Stephen Greene as director, the woebegone comedy has been available on VOD since mid-February; it finally opens in limited release this weekend.

With Russell involved and Jake Gyllenhaal and Catherine Keener among its cast members, how bad could it be? Pretty bad. Unwatchably bad. Give it the Razzie now and be done with it bad.

From its intrusively generic soundtrack heavy on cheesy strings to its painfully frantic stabs at comic business (consider that Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman delivers perhaps the film’s only even moderately modulated performance), “Accidental Love” might well qualify for disaster relief.

It starts off with what appears to be a fake ’Happy Days’ episode as roller-skating carhop Alice (Jessica Biel) serves customers at a ’50s-style drive-in restaurant in small town Indiana.

But instead of the Fonz, we get a porn-stached James Marsden as motorcycle cop Scott, who invites Alice to a fancy dinner that evening in order to propose to her.

But, as fate and some strange plotting decisions would have it, a klutzy construction worker falls on Alice during their meal, shooting a nail into her head.

Right before the surgeon (Bill Hader), who breezes through in a cameo, is about to remove the foreign object, we find out that Alice is uninsured and can’t pay the $150,000 bill. You would think the restaurant would be held accountable, but no. Instead she is released with the warning that her untreated injury could cause her to fly into irrational rages, speak foreign languages (in this case, Portuguese) and suffer from uncontrollable sexual urges all of which eventually have little to no payoff in terms of laughs.

After a brief ill-advised attempt at home surgery by a drunken veterinarian (have mercy on Kirstie Alley), Alice decides to head off to Washington, D.C., to plead her case with her local congressman, Howard Birdwell (Gyllenhaal, whose bug-eyed exertions here make his sociopathic “Nightcrawler” creep seem like understatement).

So just because you can never have too many snicker-inducing medical conditions going on simultaneously with one character’s body, she is accompanied by a reverend who has had a pharmaceutically induced constant erection for three years (Kurt Fuller) and a friend whose weight-lifting regimen has led to a collapsed anus (Tracy Morgan, all but undone by his character’s witless predicament).

At which point “Accidental Love” turns into toothless satire about self-serving politicos that can hardly compete with the real-life partisan shenanigans that regularly go on up and down Capitol Hill. Even someone as dependably good as Keener collapses under the weight of a stiff bouffant wig and staid Barbara Bush wardrobe as a House Whip who pushes the dopey idea of building a military base on the moon while recruiting Alice as a pawn for her pet project.

As Keener’s Speaker of the House rival, James Brolin (replacing James Caan creative differences?) mainly exists to endure an embarrassing, protracted death by choking on a Girl Scout cookie or rather a Girl Squaw cookie, as they are known in this alternate universe.

About the only scene that rises above the rest of the haphazard proceedings takes place in Howard’s office as he becomes the grateful recipient of Alice’s sudden bouts of lust. As the song “At Last” plays on the soundtrack, we see their frisky arms and legs flailing about while the camera circles around them. But then that mood is killed because Gyllenhaal (who hasn’t been in such an at-odds-with-itself curio since 2001’s “Bubble Boy”) and Biel (madcap is not her strong suit) have zero chemistry together otherwise.

In the era of the Cold War, it was common to have ensemble farces such as these that found humor in world events 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove,” for instance, or 1966’s “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” The difference is that those movies were made by people who knew what they were doing. Maybe if Russell had stayed on board, “Accidental Love” wouldn’t have gone so completely off the rails.

You can see why he might have been attracted to the story; his strengths include letting a big cast bounce wildly off one another (“Flirting With Disaster”) and finding comedy in topical themes (“Three Kings”). But now that Obamacare has arrived (years after this movie was shot), the central notion of health insurance reform feels rather moot. And HBO’s “Veep,” Netflix’s “House of Cards” not to mention “The Daily Show” have already done a pretty thorough job of scorching our elected officials’ integrity within a five-mile radius of the Beltway.

Just when you think “Accidental Love” is finally about to release you from its grip, there comes an all-too-expected dance number set to pop music being performed by actors who probably should know better followed by a blooper reel. When your entire movie essentially is one long blooper reel, this seems redundant.

Watch Accidental Love For Free On Gomovies.