Made

It is hard not to think of Made as the spiritual successor to Swingers. Both are independent films with overlapping creative teams. Both star Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn. Both were written by Favreau. Of course, there are some differences as well. Swingers was directed by Doug Liman where Made was helmed by Favreau himself. The story of Swingers is simple, intimate, and focused on Los Angeles culture. Made, while constructed with a similar independent sensibility, has a story that reaches for more, shooting on both coasts and telling a less intimate genre story about petty gangsters. I was never the biggest Swingers fan, connecting more with Bottle Rocket and Clerks from the same era, but I appreciated it as a solid micro-budget movie. Made, on the other hand, I didn’t like at all.

The problems with Made do not stem from its desire to be bigger than its predecessor. The Swingers indie style, like an emphasis on character and dialogue captured with simple camera set ups, is translated reasonably well to Made’s comedic crime drama. The movie’s big failing, for me, is the characters themselves. Namely, I could not stand Vince Vaughn’s Ricky.

In both Swingers and Made, Vaughn plays a high energy, fast talking, semi-sleazeball. His antics are grating in Swingers, but they do serve an important purpose in the movie. It positions Favreau and Vaughn as foils for one another. Vaughn is slick but rarely genuine, is selfish and self absorbed, and as a result girls, and relationships, come and go with little impact. Favreau is more soulful and self-conscious, perhaps obsessively fixated on social and romantic issues, and so the failed relationship that kicks off the story becomes an anchor around his neck. This same dynamic does not work in Made.

In Made, the two again play friends. However, they don’t feel like friends. Bobby, played by Favreau, seems constantly annoyed by Ricky. I can remember no time in the movie where Bobby is even bemused by Ricky’s shenanigans. There is no moment of “yeah, he winds me up sometimes, but this is why we are friends.” Instead, all Ricky does is make Bobby’s life harder and Bobby seems to hate him for it. They fight constantly. This hurts the believably of the movie because so much of the conflict comes from Ricky and his inability to follow the plan, keep his mouth shut, and not generally act like an idiot. You are left wondering why Bobby would put up with him, why he would vouch for him, and why he wouldn’t just send him packing after the umpteenth time he worsens their situation through his antics.

This is then amplified by the fact that they are acting as low level operators in the world of organized crime. In Swingers, the stakes are getting over a past flame and healing emotionally. In Made, the stakes are quite literally life and death. Upset the wrong person, sour the wrong agreement, mess up the wrong drop, and the two main characters could very well end up killed. Ricky even brings up the possibility of getting whacked in narrative. With all that on the table, it just doesn’t make any sense for Bobby to stick by a guy he evidently can’t stand being around and whose presence is a constant liability.

Lastly, there is no shape to the movie’s story, especially concerning the main characters. Things happen, but the results don’t matter. None of the characters grow or even change. The ending tells us one characters’ priorities have been realigned, but nothing in the movie up until that point suggests the character has been evolving. Another character looks like he might be headed for some kind of redemption arc, but his triumphant moment is immediately undercut. The crime story ultimately builds to nothing terribly interesting. I didn’t come away from this movie feeling like I went on a journey, I came away feeling like I watched some things happen.

The movie tries to find comedy in Vince Vaughn’s disaster magnet Ricky wittily bantering through high stakes gangster scenarios, with Favreau as his straight man, but instead it creates an annoying twit who is so unlikeable, and dangerous, that it tears at the fabric of the movie’s premise by making you question why these two friends would ever spend time with one another.

Would Recommend: If you love dry 90s era independent film making.

Would Not Recommend: If you prefer movies with likeable main characters.