Oh dear.

Conrad (Matt Walton) owns a New York advertising agency. Recently single, his nights are filled with TV dinners and channel surfing. Bored, he calls an Australian hustler, Tyler (Sean Matic) and has a good hour at home with him. After a joint and some sex which we never see, Tyler reveals that he's engaged, and is only hooking to save for his marriage and honeymoon. Brandon quickly develops a crush and offers Tyler a one-thousand dollar a week office assistant/live-in fuck bag role, which Tyler instantly accepts. On the job, Tyler confronts hostility from Brandon's jealous, suspicious creative team and, well, things kind of go no where but also in all directions from this point as this already-woeful movie jumps aboard the Crapola Express to Shitville.

200 American is a really bad movie. There isn't anything in it that's worth praising. The film is only eighty minutes long (good news for bored viewers who won't be able to wait for it to finish) but it is so underdeveloped and anorexic that scenes are still slow, overlong, and repetitive. Production values seem to be a step or two above zero, but this doesn't excuse glitches such as mismatched eyesight lines, glaring breaks in continuity and an almost complete absence of narrative logic.

Ludicrous dialogue is the order of the day and illustrates the film's slapdash approach. For example, Conrad's ad-company looks pretty modest: his offices look pretty low-rent and he has a staff of only three or four people. So it's hilarious to hear him say, when two models go down with food poisoning and need emergency replacements, that "I managed to book Naomi Campbell for tomorrow". When someone like Michael Jackson wanted to book Campbell (for the Herb Ritts video for "In The Closet"), even he would have had to have booked her months in advance and forked over her six or seven figure paycheck and in any case, the imperious Campbell is known for either turning up to shoots hours late, refusing to do what she's asked, or not turning up at all. In other words, she's the last person you'd think of as a reliable emergency backup for a modelling shoot and even if you did you wouldn't be able to grab her at a day's notice. Didn't have the time or professionalism to think of other lines to replace clangers like the bizarre Campbell reference? A second draft, or a bit of workshopping, would have cleaned the dialogue up.

Also, the usual john/hooker dialogue exchanges ("how'd a nice young guy like you end up in this line of work?", "why does a good-looking guy like you need to pay for sex?" etc.) are unwanted guests which, as any john or hooker will tell you, never actually take place during jobs. Again, this is the result of a lack of care and research or maybe even the lack of a script altogether - were the actors given a two-sentence brief of their characters, and then just told to improvise based on what they've seen such characters do and say on TV shows?

Backstory information is provided in the form of answering maching messages, which bring us up to speed way too fast: "BEEP! ... Conrad, I think it's time you started getting out there again and there's a guy that I think would be right for you and he's nothing like your last boyfriend who you broke up with three months ago ... BEEP!" or overheard asides from peripheral characters who exit their scenes muttering things to each other like "did you see what was going on there? I definitely think they were flirting with each other!" It's insulting to tell audiences things that are readily observable and it's hard to stay with a film that's been made with such an apparent laziness and lack of confidence. If you don't think that dialogue or action in a scene has expressed flirtation between two characters, then rewrite and reshoot the scene. Don't leave it to your extras and set decorations such as answering machines to do all this verbal underlining and arrow marking. I can't remember sideline characters looking in on Clarice and Dr. Lecter and saying things like "gee, they seem to be developing a complex, quasi-romantic relationship with each other don't they?" and "yeah, she sure seems to have found a strange father-substitute in this one" and so on. Scenes are either complete or incomplete. When characters have to literally tell the audience what was supposed to happen in a scene we've just watched, then, well, things are pretty dire.

Most odd is Tyler's Australian accent, which sometimes sounds vaguely Australian but is more a kind of Boston/New Zealand hybrid with Cockney aspects. Maybe Matic was raised all over the world by some kind of gypsy family, or maybe Tyler has plied his portable trade for a year here and there at various international locations. It's a strange, untrue sounding accent and Matic mumbles and swallows his lines anyway so even if he he had the diction of Glenda Jackson you probably still wouldn't be able to understand a lot of what he's saying.

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Review by Mark Adnum