If you took a video camera, surgically attached it to the head of a feral dog and let it wander around for 90 minutes, then shot the dog and retrieved the camera, the unedited footage would look more professional and be more entertaining than this film. I'm actually reluctant to criticize A New Wave because it's so bluntly atrocious in even the most basic elements of filmmaking that it makes me suspect writer/director Jason Carvey is mentally handicapped. It's not appropriate to call someone a moron when that's a medically accurate description of their mental faculties. For the sake of this review, however, I'll make the dubious assumption that Carvey's brain is fully functional and free of any disease or defect.
It's a little hard to describe the plot of A New Wave. It's so haphazardly put together and poorly executed that it makes Frankenstein's Monster look like Michelangelo's David. But here goes. Desmond (Andrew Keegan) is a whiny little bitch who hates his job as a bank teller so much he can't even enjoy having a smokin' hot college babe like Julie (Lacey Chabert) as a girlfriend. He wants to be a painter and feels the bank job is crushing his underdeveloped soul. Desmond is the sort of pathetic man-child that constantly belittles himself and everything he does, forcing Julie to repeatedly tell him how wonderful he is. Rather than recognize what an annoying loser Desmond is, this film casts him as the put upon everyman which whom the audience is supposed to sympathize.
Desmond is so unhappy he agrees to go along with a plan to rob the bank where he works. The robbery is the brainchild of Desmond's friend Gideon (John Krasinski), who is one of those poorly written characters that get dissected in screen writing classes as examples of what you're not supposed to do. He's supposed to be this sardonic hipster rebel but everything about him is so over the top and exaggerated that he seems more like an escaped mental patient. A third friend is also in on the plot. Rupert (Dean Edwards) is a black guy who is British because
well, the British Black Guy has become kind of a stock character in contemporary films. I guess writer/director Carvey opened up the Big Book of Movie Clichés at random and got the page titled "Black Guy, British".
After everything is set up, there's really not much plot that follows. Our prospectively criminal trio needs guns, so they wind up spending the evening with Fabio's evil twin. That causes Desmond to miss a date with Julie and she gets mugged, though she ends up looking more like she got a case of pink eye. There's a weird scene that plays like an homage to Ferris Bueller's Day Off where Gideon is Ferris, Desmond is Cameron and Julie is Sloan. And a monkey wrench gets thrown in the robbery plans when the chance to succeed as a painter basically falls out of the sky and hits Desmond right in the nuts. There's also some stuff with Julie's parents that makes so little sense, I can't believe writer/director Carvey ever had a mother and father of his own. He must have been orphaned as an infant and then raised by some kindly snails.
There is one marginally clever idea present in A New Wave. Gideon plans out the bank robbery like he was writing a screenplay and we get to see his "movie" acted out in a fantasy sequence that's almost but not quite funny. There's also one honest laugh when the robbery occurs and Gideon is first confronted with how reality is differing from his imagination. Outside of those two things, this movie is punishingly stupid and viciously unfunny.
Rising above all of its other flaws, A New Wave riddled with technically inept filmmaking that can't be ignored. I'm not just talking about things like poor sound quality or the movie being out of focus on more than one occasion. I'm talking about shots that are framed so poorly you end up with one character's head talking to another character crotch. I'm talking about shots that look like they were filmed by a cameraman who was either drunk or had a severe inner ear problem. There's no rhyme or reason to anything the camera does in this film. It's as if writer/director Carvey had a 20 sided die, like from Dungeons and Dragons, where each face of the die indicated a different direction and Carver would just roll the die every 30 seconds, moving the camera in whatever direction came up. And if you think I'm blowing Carvey's directorial incompetence out of proportion, consider this. There's a scene where Desmond and Gideon are having a conversation while peeing on the side of a building. When they finish urinating, they don't move away and continue their discussion. No, they lean right up against the spots on the wall where they just relieved themselves and keep talking.
Movies like A New Wave are clear evidence of just how much desperation infests the film industry. This script is so terrible it would attract bomb-sniffing dogs and anyone who looked at the footage from the first day of filming could have seen that a bomb-sniffing dog would have been a better director than Jason Carvey. Yet someone still forked over a significant amount of money to make this film because that's how badly they wanted to be part of show business. The cast and crew took jobs on this project because that's how badly they needed the work. And this thing got burned onto DVDs and shipped all over the country because that's how much pressure there is to try and make money off of any and every worthless cinematic fiasco.
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