The Machine review – standup comedian makes for limp movie star

Bert Kreischer turns a famous routine into a full-length movie with some surprising visual style but a lack of laughter

If you’re going to put a standup comedian into a big, climactic fight scene, it better be really funny. That’s just one of many rules you may not realize were in place before watching The Machine, a feature-length extension of standup comedian Bert Kreischer’s most famous routine. It’s a story about how the former Florida State University frat boy and prolific partier took a college trip to Russia, where he bumbled into confidence with the Russian mob and wound up helping some gangsters rob a train. It sounds enough like a set piece from an early-2000s studio comedy that the impulse to make a long-form version makes sense – at least on paper.

Here, Jimmy Tatro plays the college-aged Kreischer in flashbacks, but he doesn’t enter the movie until a ways in, because The Machine makes a strange structural choice. It starts with Kreischer, playing a version of himself, already a famous comedian, dealing with the aftermath of his viral-hit routine. His fame has exacerbated his proclivities toward hard partying, the glorification of which has taken a toll on his family life, even as it sends his podcast shooting up the charts. Kreischer’s success also brings him to the attention of a Russian mobster, whose precious family-heirloom watch was stolen during Kreischer’s robbery. The mobster sends his icy daughter Irina (Iva Babić) to retrieve Kreischer and (improbably) bring him back to Russia so he can locate the watch. Eventually, those flashbacks kick in, supplying the particulars of Kreischer’s original Russian jaunt and brief, accidental life of crime.

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