Seeing The FP for a second time (and the first time sober) I was somewhat shocked to discover that, hey, there’s actually some smart stuff going on here.
Beyond just giggling at the ridiculous speech (the vernacular is as peculiar as an episode of Deadwood) you can study the frame and see it exploding with creativity. A Civil War leitmotif runs through the entire picture, as do very amusing “faked” old computer graphics and tongue-in-cheek sound cues. It’d be easy to shrug The FP off as a gimmick movie – and, yeah, death by Dance Dance Revolution is campy and weird – but it is really hard to make something like that watchable for more than 15 minutes. The performances, particularly Art Hsu’s and Caitlyn Folley are so good and so funny that they actually don’t just stay funny, if that makes any sense. . . .
