Choke (Movie Review)

Movie Review
Choke
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald
Directed by: Clark Gregg
Runtime: 1:29

If you’re expecting something normal from a movie based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel, you’ve never heard of Fight Club. Despite being released almost a decade ago, the film is still referenced quite a bit in pulp culture on a regular basis. There were lofty expectations for the film rendition of Palahniuk’s 2001 novel Choke. Director Clark Gregg does create the same bizarre feel in Choke that was displayed in Fight Club. The problem while Choke is that it tries to use it’s bizarreness in place of having a strong story and well-driven character development which was the real reason why Fight Club is still fondly remember so many years after it’s release.

Sam Rockwell plays Victor, a sex addict who has a mother in a mental institution. To make ends, he works as an actor at a colonial re-enactment society but moonlights as a scam-artist who chokes on food at restaurants to get people to save him and guilt them into giving him some money for his misfortune. Victor, compelled mostly because of his addiction, slept with practically all the doctors and nurses at his mom’s facility. Or so he thought as he meets her new doctor, Paige (Kelly Macdonald) and immediately falls for her. Paige quickly shoots him down telling him she has heard many stories about him. Later on, Paige informs Victor that his mother is getting worse and the only way that he can save her is by having sex with Paige and then harvest the cells of the umbilical cord to help his mother. Victor is more than willing but cannot perform for some reason. His His best friend, who is also a sex addict and is in love with a stripper, says it’s because he has an emotional interest with Paige unlike all the other women Victor sleeps with. Victor doesn’t believe this and as his mother gets worse, so does Victor as he begins a downward spiral of his own.

The story is intriguing on paper. Sex-addicted scammer falls in love but can’t get it up. It’s a cruel twist of fate that would have been quite interesting except for the fact that Victor is not a likeable character. In fact, the character gets more and more unlikeable throughout the film despite they keep flashing back to his pathetic childhood. If these flashbacks were used as a device to create some empathy for Victor, it works in a sense because we begin to understand why he does what he does but it doesn’t explain why he’s becoming more of a rotten human being and doesn’t help to create sympathy for an already unsympathetic character. He’s too unlikeable to even be considered a charming jerk.

The story itself is a bit convoluted and could only come from the same polluted waters that a title like Fight Club came out of. But while Fight Club was interesting because the story could be seen as the 1984 of commercialism, Choke doesn’t have all that much substance to fall back on. At best, it can offer a few chuckles on just how perverted a tale it is but most of the time it leads to one convoluted scene after another. Even at the end when the major twist is revealed, it feels as if all the characters don’t entirely believe how they got there. It truly feels like the writer poorly painted himself in the corner and then tried desperately for everyone to believe that there was a trap door in the corner all along.

An poorly imagined main character with an equally poorly created plot makes for a bad movie. For those looking for the next Fight Club, one would be extremely disappointed. This may be unfair because a movie should be reviewed on it’s own merits. On it’s own, it’s an extremely disappointing movie. Watch Fight Club instead.

☆