The Darwin Awards
starring Joseph Fiennes, Winona Ryder, David Arquette, Juliette Lewis, Chris Penn, Tom
Hollander, Tim Blake Nelson, special appearances by LawrenceFerlinghetti and Metallica
written and directed by Finn Taylor
“The Darwin Awards” are a real faux list of awards accorded people each year who accidentally kill themselves in such a stupid, stupid, stupid manner that removing themselves from the ranks of the living is actually a benefit for humanity by removing their DNA from the human gene pool. Honorable mention is always given to people who accidentally neuter themselves (also removing their DNA form the gene pool). Predictably, alcohol and drug use play a significant role in selecting Darwin Award winners.
I’ve known about The Darwin Awards for more than a decade, and I have seen Darwin Awards books in the bookstores, but I have never bought and read them. I have only listened to titillating descriptions provided by others of some of the stupid people chronicled therein.
Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder play a couple of insurance company adjusters trying to profile Darwin Award candidates and save their company millions of dollars in payments to what are really accidental suicides. In the process, Fiennes, an obsessive-compulsive safety freak to start with, flirts with the edge of Darwin Awardism himself.
This movie is not nearly as funny as I hoped it would be. It would have been funnier as a real documentary of some real Darwin Award winners, although some might call that just plain sad, not funny at all. There are some great performers here featured in a host of small roles. I enjoyed seeing so many people I recognized, like Tom Hollander, Kevin and Nora Dunn, and especially Chris Penn - not to mention the Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself. Even the band members of Metallica were given speaking parts. Way cool! This film might have been Chris Penn’s last performance before his untimely death a couple of years ago.