Status Update: A Facebook Fairytale

This short film has energy and an idea and more or less it carries it along just so long as you are on board with the crude humor throughout. The plot sees a man unlucky in love and bored at his job suddenly finding that his Facebook updates come true no matter what he types. Suddenly he is on a rampage of updates with surely no possible downside or consequences?

I wasn't sure what the genre was of this film when I watched it and perhaps as a result I was taken aback a bit by the level of swearing and crude language – in particular a really coarse and unreal exchange between Allan and his female boss. This really set the tone for the film though because it is all about the excess whether it be the gore, the jokes or the language and it is a real shame because this dominates everything. A little salt in a meal brings out the flavor and too much ruin it and I think what we have here is too much salt. The idea is a good one and some of the jokes made in the montage are decent, while the ideas at the end are decent (including the end credits using Facebook photos of the crew and cast) but it isn't as wildly funny as it thinks it is and the heavy crudity is not done as well as it needed to be.

It doesn't help that the main characters are annoying – not just in the context of the film but also directly to the viewer. Dunn is a big lug of a fella and he has no real charm to the viewer – this is not a journey his character is on, he is annoying from start to finish. Ehelepola is annoying but at least in the context of the film his performance works. Clarke is good in her simple role. The fault pretty much lies with the director and writers – they took a good idea and poured the salt in, with crudity that seems in there for the sake of it generally overpowering the good jokes. If you're in the mood for that then you'll love the film, but for me it was just too damn base from start to finish.