The Ex (2006)

Fiona is a baby on the way, and she and her husband Tom cannot wait to plan for their baby’s life by looking for the perfect name. Being a lawyer is a demanding job, and Sofia has hopes of becoming a full-time mother to Fiona, but first, she would need Tom to earn a better salary.

He is currently a restaurant worker on his training days and is eager to move up the ladder into a head chef position. At his place of work, when he stood up for a friend, instead of having his back, he was the one getting backstabbed. His actions cost him his promising culinary profession, and now, together with his wife. They are moving to her hometown in the Midwest. In the meantime, he will work at a New Age advertisement company for her father.

The duty of training Tom to be a suitable candidate at Sunburst is given to Sofia’s first high school love, the boyfriened Chip who is a rather charming and affable paraplegic. He is, after all, liked by everyone. Yet when Tom attempts to make an effort to get into the team and starts to put in work, Chip winds up manipulating him with techniques that go beyond the paradigm of fair play, adding in a side of lowkey espionage. The confused resident of New York decides to give a taste of his own medicine, but it doesn’t take long for him to understand that in addition to dignity, the wheelchair clad Machiavelli desires thing. His wife.

Tom stands up for his friend and gets unemployed as a consequence so they both adore and care for their child the best they can. In the end, Tom comes clean to his father in law, loses his job, and seeks forgiveness.

When Tom gets laid off from the eating house, he wonders aloud, “What if this whole thing was a sign from God to get me to shift out of town?”

Sofia and Tom share passionate kisses while he gropes at her in a romantic atmosphere. We see an interaction between Sofia and Chip where some high school cheers are performed before Chip picks up Sofia and holds her around the waist while making a face at Tom. Now, both Sofia and another woman put their hands into their shirts, and as they try to rub “Bag Balm” onto their breasts, we see the both of them struggle. While attempting to snuggle and kiss his wife, Tom is greeted by, “Drunk Uncle Oliver uses that area. You should just put it on.” Some other time, as Tom is making his way down from his wife’s lips toward her breasts, he is met with, “Oliver feeds from there! That’s really weird!”

There are quite a few that make statements about Chip’s penis (Chip included). Sophia treats Tom’s “peep” with a nurse. Sofia reveals to Tom that she has slept with Chip during her high school years. A colleague or an acquaintance of Tom from work starts to tell him about her intercourse with Chip (he cuts her off). Tom and Sofia see a colleague who is preparing for a career in marriage therapy.

He puts forth, ‘How about we commence by grabbing each other’s private parts’? In a different scene, a friend also tells Tom how to improve the sex he has with his wife.

Chip makes Tom’s laptop play a clip of ‘gay porn’ on loop. We observe two men without shirts on, kissing. Sofia’s breast is “accidentally” touched by Chip when he is caressing the baby’s head. He also informs Sofia that he has kept her panties after their escapade together. There are brief skirts, deep necklines and other attire. In the gym locker room, Tom is removing his shirt when Chip is first shown sitting unclothed in the wheelchair.

To show that Chip is not a cripple, Tom picks him up and drops him from the top of the stairs. During this process Tom and Chip engage in violence by throwing punches, with Chip continuously colliding and smashing into Tom and subsequently throwing him to the ground. Tom chokes another man in a wheelchair, who, in retaliation breaks Tom’s fingers. Tom tumbles over the handlebars of his mountain bike, smashing into the parked car windshield and the helmet. In one incident a snowboard strikes him in the face. A metal fence gets rammed by a man dressed as a pickle, who is riding a skateboard.

An angry argument occurs in a restaurant kitchen and a man is battered over the head with a pork chop. While in marriage therapy, Tom and Sofia use padded bats on each other and on themselves, including to the face. Tom, who is quite passionate, also thwacks the counselor with the bat, targeting her face. Tom is sprayed in the face with some kind of garden/weed spray by a neighbor woman.

Chip is struck by a bus while standing defiantly in the street, trying to assert his dominance by holding his wheelchair over his head. Later on, he is seen crawling into a building, now covered in casts on his legs.

In her presence, Sofia allows her disrespectful ten-year-old neighbor to use foul language and while his father forbade him from coming over to her house, he does so anyway. Additionally, Sofia has these relaxed rules which already enable the child to disrespect Tom.

In the film, it appears that every character acts in their own self-interests. For example, while Tom used to defend a colleague at the office, he seems to be ready to dismiss his father-in-law because of a personal blunder. [Spoiler Alert] Chip is not as serious as he pretended to be. He let it slip that he was only pretending to be disabled to use the handicap parking spots at the mall, and, of course, get plenty of sex.

For years now, many thinkers have tried to understand what comedy is. What makes people happy? What makes people laugh? What makes people roll on the floor laughing? Most of the time it is the element of surprise: the common slipping on a banana peel. At times, it is an unexpected situation such as a talking mailbox in a candid camera setup. Ambivalence of conflicting emotions can also tickle one’s funny bone, like Bill Cosby’s humorous but quiet warning to a troublesome son: “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.”

Unfortunately, we are starting to see the jokes today revolve around absurd situations and childish toilet humor. The two “comic” scenes are the focal points in more than half of the sitcoms broadcasted on television today. These two bits are also the highlight of “The Ex”. (Which explains why the movie stars from shows like Scrubs and Arrested Development cameos in the movie).

The movie characters have an overall likable personality, for example the lead character and the married couple who claim to be in love but show no affection. This self-laughing and meandering obscene low budget film devoid of laughable moments contains everything from women’s body excretions during childbirth discussion to non stop pronoun banter. (Let’s not open the door on how the movie deals with physical handicaps) Most of the other 90 minutes of the movie consist of Tom running alongside several stale and cringe self-loathing moments, But in the end results in the same laughter filled moments as an ordinary 30 minute television episode. The major issue with the movie is that there is no “next channel”.

The Ex was expected to debut in December 2006, but for reasons easier ot understand today, it title lingered until January, February, March and even April of 07. Finally, it was slated to release in May amidst a large pack of summer blockbusters. Hopefully it gets lost in the shuffle and does not attract the undeserved attention that could lure families into getting a shock at discovering its campiness and thence, embark on the elusive journey to objectively minor DVD bargain bin at best. Such a tragedy or unintentionally hilarious destiny is in itself a stroke of genius and a large part of the only joy this movie has to offer.

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