Director: Brandon Beckner | Rated: R | Review date: 14-Feb-2010

Kevin Nealon stars as Jack West, late-night talk show host on the verge of losing his job. In order to save his career, Jack must come up with a plan to boost his ratings. Meanwhile Ross (Evan Peters), a nobody living on his own in L.A. is seeking purpose in his life. Ross seeks inspiration from an infomercial promising “remarkable power.” Behind the scenes, private detective Van Hagen (Tom Arnold) and crime scene photographer Athena (Nora Zahetner) start to put together the pieces of a bizarre and mysterious case.

I have to admit that the story was quite surprising. The premise sounded interesting and funny, but it ended up being quite clever and well thought out. The many characters and mini storylines were not as intimidating and hard to follow as they are in other films that attempt to interweave many stories into one. Beckner and co-writer Scott Sampila do a great job bringing each story together while focusing enough time on letting us learn about the characters.

The cast was great as well. Being a lower budget film, I was hoping that Arnold and Nealon weren’t just thrown on the credits to sell videos. Luckily, they were both given a good amount of screen time. I always enjoy Tom Arnold and have begun to really like Kevin Nealon after getting into the show Weeds, so I was pleased to see them both in a film together. Peters was excellent in his role as well, and I couldn’t help but see a resemblance to Patrick Fugit through his performance.

As I mentioned the story is very surprising and I got much more than expected from a comedy. When things go wrong for Ross one day while trying to make things happen, he finds himself in a sticky situation. When a dead body turns up, things get even stickier. Soon enough, the film turns into a hilarious detective mystery full of flamboyant characters. As the film progresses, we begin to see how each event and character is related to the big story. There is plenty going on in this movie to prevent it from becoming boring to say the least.

The film was topped off very well with a funny twist which I honestly didn’t see coming until the final revelations of the movie. I can’t think of too much that I didn’t like about this movie except that I didn’t really enjoy the dialog from the character Moses (Jack Plotnick). While Plotnick did a fine job playing the spoiled and scrawny Jewish kingpin, I didn’t find his lines as entertaining as the rest of the film. Aside from that, Remarkable Power ended up being not only a very funny comedy, but a fun mystery that kept me thinking all the way through.
Official site/trailer | IMDb

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