Exploring Paul Verhoeven's filmography means eventually stumbling upon Tricked, which runs for just under an hour, but doesn't seem to be a TV movie or part of a series. It was created from some kind of program/competition called Entertainment Experience, and I've been reading about it to try and understand it, but I don't. I don't even know whether calling it a competition is useful or accurate. It was some strange Dutch thing that my brain cannot comprehend or make sense of.
But the resulting film is pretty straightforward. It's short, to the point, and not nearly as crazy as most Verhoeven projects, but it works pretty well as a dark comedy. There's basically a terrible husband, and he's celebrating his 50th birthday, and he has various affairs that collide and mess up aspects of his family and professional life.
From what I can gather about the production, different people initially scripted different parts of what was filmed... but Verhoeven ended up sort of doing his own thing in the end? I don't know. This is confusing. I can usually read about unusual projects and more or less understand and summarize them, but this thing - this Tricked - has kind of tricked me. Words fail me, and I just don't know.
As a movie, it's fine for what it is. It doesn't waste time and it's kind of amusing/entertaining, if a little slight, in the end. It's interesting to see some of these lesser-known Verhoeven films, though, and I'm starting to realize that even if the director's had a couple of misses in his time, he's never seemed to miss twice in a row. The guy's made almost 20 movies, and most are at least pretty good. Even the ones that aren't good are still interesting; the kinds of somewhat bad movies that aren't necessarily bad times to watch.
