The Dunk Tank: Mac and Me

When I closed the media player window after watching Mac and Me I hissed “shut the fuck up” at my computer, and I meant it with every fiber of my being. This movie is craven, dull, off-putting, and repulsive as only a true top-to-bottom corporate product can be. Its attempt at providing entertainment is a cold, unfeeling tertiary objective, like a crocodile lurking in the river whose armored back incidentally provides fleeting refuge for small birds. Where Troll 2 seemed to delight in its own backward incompetence as a work of art, to welcome and take pleasure in the suffering of its viewers, Mac and Me is as indifferent to anyone experiencing it as Deism’s absent clockmaker is to the prayers of the damned toiling on the windswept surface of Earth, His abandoned creation. It exists to promote Coca Cola, McDonalds, and a few other brands which have since faded from cultural relevance — that there’s a movie around its product placement is purely a matter of irritating necessity.

And Christ, what a movie. From the first moment the film introduces us to its titular waddling puppet abomination and his even more disturbing family of anus-mouthed aliens, there is a palpable sense that something dirty has just scuttled past you across the floor. A house centipede, perhaps, all gossamer limbs and armor plates. From the father alien’s crotch-first saunter to MAC’s (Mysterious Alien Creature) incessant whistling and bulging, watery eyes, there is nothing remotely charming or winning about these grotesques. As a shameless ripoff of Spielberg’s classic family feature E. T. the Extraterrestrial, Mac and Me does not so much invite comparison as demand it as a matter of moral propriety, and in the matter of the weird little guy at the center of its story and action it is so woefully lacking as to seem almost intentionally repellent. MAC’s face forms no expressions. The wires tugging his bandy-legged little carcass around are often visible, and when glimpsed in motion it is often clear he has been tossed by someone standing just offscreen.

From its endless scenes of faux-cool consumerist partying to the successive baffling switchbacks of its final minutes, Mac and Me bravely straddles the line between film and commercial, daring to ask: what if a movie was just a list of things to buy? That its cast is insufferable and its camerawork a step below indifferent only serves as garnish to the inescapable fact that the movie is to cinema as wax fruit is to the real thing. It can be looked at, picked up, displayed, but just try biting into it. It’s E. T. with all of Spielberg’s charm and craftsmanship siphoned out and all the edges sanded off, his winning cast of kids and teens replaced by failed third-generation clones of 1980s sitcom supporting characters. I wish this movie had never been made. I wish I could yank it back out of my eyes like some sort of ocular parasite. I wish MAC was real so I could squash him like a bug.