Bad Cupid

Bad Cupid

Please, just stop it with the “Bad” in front of “Good” nouns in movie titles. We’ve had “Bad Santa,” “Bad Teacher,” and “Bad Lieutenant.” What comes next, “Bad Cupcake?”

“Bad Cupid,” which opens on Valentine’s Day, features a black clad Cupid named Archie (John Rhys-Davies) who wears red high-tops. He is fed up with human stupidity about love. He drinks and swears and uses arrows real crossbow arrows that leave serious call-an-ambulance wounds. He also uses a baseball bat and a gun.

It is an uphill battle to build an entire movie around the idea that Cupid is an old dude who hangs out in bars and insults people and threatens people and kidnaps people and beats up people. And yet “Bad Cupid” does not come close to pulling it off. The characters are unappealing, the direction is indifferent, the actors sound like they were just handed their lines, and the jokes aren’t funny. Maybe the awkward pauses reflect hope for audience laughter to fill them. Unlikely.

He knocks a ring into a lake while interrupting a romantic proposal and tells the woman who was about to accept she can do better. Meanwhile Dave (Shane Nepveu) and Denise (Christine Turturro) are leaving an Italian restaurant where she abruptly breaks up with him because she disagrees about whether or not he ordered good pasta in front of the homeless guy eating their leftovers. Dave is devastated.

And that’s about all we ever learn about Dave, who seemingly has no other purpose or activity or interest beyond obsessing about getting back together with Denise. (Is it just coincidence that Denise was also the name of ex-girlfriend Adam Sandler obsessed about in Saturday Night Live skits?)

This is what I call Smurf scripting, where every character has one defining characteristic. Denise’s sole characteristic if you can even call it that seems to be dumping Dave because she wants some sort of romantic gesture like in movies, “like Sarah Conner and the Terminator.” So we get a conversation in a movie about how romance isn’t like movies as though no one has ever thought of that before.

Dave’s cousin Morris (Briana Marin) is his only friend because her defining characteristic is being bossy loudmouth who can’t commit (“Pretty much midway through third orgasm I’m already calling Uber”)

Then there is Dessert Smurf I mean Stella (Amelia Sorensen), who likes chocolate cake and has sex with someone she just met standing in line as well as Henry (Claybourne Elder), who exists only to be assaulted kidnapped by Stella during this scene when they put ham cheese on Kaiser rolls between kidnapping weddings at least until Manhattan vs New England clam chowder as love life metaphor veers pointless whether you prefer cream base tomato base for your soup.

The characters move randomly from one dull location another including Las Vegas briefly then spending way too long hanging out inside dingy bars’ dingy men’s rooms

I briefly thought about what a neon TURNT sign, especially when it flickered off just as they were leaving for another random stop, the deli order one. But significance is not what this movie is trying to do.

Whatever that may be, it fails entirely. “Bad Cupid” is a Bad Movie because of its terrible writing, directing, acting and editing.

Watch Bad Cupid For Free On Gomovies.