CAVEMEN – The Blu Review

Review by Sam Moffitt

Charlie Kaufman has a lot to answer for. His multi level style of screen writing now has multiple imitators.  Witness if you will a little film called Cavemen. In the style of Charlie Kaufman’s screen play for Adaptation and other films, we see a young, urban professional named Dean struggle to write a screen play, bounce ideas off some unnamed friends, present his screen play to a way too convincing Hollywood producer (very well played by Jason Patric) and struggle to live through the incidents that will come to make up the screen play we see him write, and that we also see being performed in front of our eyes.

Not quite as engaging as Kaufman’s style Cavemen does have its fun moments, but, well…

Dean and three of his friends have figured out how to keep the frat boy life style going well after college (if in fact any of these guys went to college.)  They live in a converted warehouse (named The Cave, thus they are the “Cavemen”, and, of course, they also have the required Neanderthal attitudes towards women) and run a combination bar, party house, concert venue and thus do not have to pay rent on their own places.  They live where they work in other words, but that also means they do a lot of drinking and fornicating, and talking about drinking and fornicating, which gets real old, real fast.

Dean’s best female friend who also tends bar at the Cave is Tess, very well played by Camilla Bell, who was excellent in a little thriller called The Quiet in 2005.

And, as you would expect, the main point of the movie is not only Dean’s struggle to get his screen play written and produced but to find True Love amid all the easy sex in the city of LA.  To their credit this crew managed to film LA in a totally different fashion than we are used to, I don’t know where they found these locations but I have never seen LA look this good.

And again, as you would expect, we know that Tess is the right woman for Dean, long before he does.  We see him do all the fun things that speed dating can bring about when you have nothing but time on your hands and no moral compass to speak of.  Dean and his friends go through the roundelays you might see in a French art house movie, just not as well presented.

It takes Dean so long to figure out that he really does love Tess, and so very, very long for him to say it we get tired of this movie way before it’s over.  I lost count of the number of times we see Dean run on foot after a cab that Tess is in so he can pull her out of the cab, and then not say the right thing!

She gets tired of it and so do we.  I hate to slam any movie, especially an independent effort like this, but we have seen this material too many times before and done better.  There’s really not much new here.

Well Go USA’s bluray looks terrific.  The only extras are some trailers for other releases in their catalog, all of which look more interesting than Cavemen.