Jon Chattman's thecheappop.com

Fox Searchlight

Choke is that kind of movie you want to love, but can’t bring yourself to do so no matter how hard you try and no matter how many images of boobies they flash on the screen. The Clark Gregg film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s acclaimed and dubbed unfilmable novel (who dubbed it that anyway?), stars Sam Rockwell as sex addict Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout and colonial theme park staffer who scams people by choking on pieces of food while dining. Why? It gives people a sense of purpose, and makes them feel better about themselves. It also makes them feel like they have to care for Victor long after the Heimlich. Victor, also gets in return, a sense of love for a mili-second. That’s the problem with Victor. He doesn’t know how to love or be loved. His mother, a selfish woman who lies to him about his father’s origins and now stays cooped up in a home due to Alzheimer’s disease, never showed him how. That’s the problem with the movie too. It’s hip, Rockwell impresses (although we’ve seen this performance by him before), the supporting cast is killer (notably Anjelica Houston as his selfish and now Alzheimers suffering mother and Kelly MacDonald as a nurse Victor has feelings for – yes, feelings), and the writing can be zippy, but it’s hard to love. In the end, one walks out of the theater wondering what might’ve been. You want to laugh your ass off. You want to be engaged throughout. You want to find some redeeming quality for the characters, but ultimately, you don’t. Maybe it tries to hard to be the new hip cult flick. Case in point: Radiohead’s brilliant “Reckoner” playing over the credits. Anyway you slice it, Choke fails to stimulate.

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