Death’s a conundrum. It’s in all of our futures, yet that certain knowledge is too much for most of us to process – to accept that “for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction and time is its only measure”, as Tom Stoppard put it in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And so, we simply live our lives as if we’re entirely ignorant of death until some catastrophe brings us face to face with it.
For filmmaker Steve (no second name given), played by Matthew Modine, that catastrophe is a terminal diagnosis that pushes him to work on what he believes will be his final masterpiece. Therefore, he gathers a cast and crew and sets about trying to “break” the story, all the while scouting suitably picturesque locations in Ireland – which is mostly an excuse to situate every scene in some kind of beautiful Irish meadow, brook, ruin or pub and, presumably, to allow the cast and crew of The Martini Shot a nice holiday into the bargain.
In that sense it’s like one of those Happy Madison pictures where Adam Sandler and his friends get to schmooze around Hawaii, or wherever, as long as they have some kind of film to show for it at the end, but what The Martini Shot more resembles is a Woody Allen film. Modine’s character is a Woody Allen protagonist through and through: he’s a filmmaker; he talks in metaphors about life and art; he quotes the existential-comic musings of figures like Charlie Chaplin in voiceover; and he acknowledges, constantly, that he’s a character in a film and that he wishes for that film to be narratively and thematically satisfying.
And, like a Woody Allen protagonist, he spends much time talking to his therapist; said therapist is played by Morgana Robinson who was so memorable as Jemima Gina in the first Toast of London, and who emerges against the odds as the standout performance here, though up against such talents as Modine, Derek Jacobi and John Cleese. Mind you, Cleese, in his bit part as a doctor, does get the best line as he tells the dying Steve, “I’ll see you on Thursday, but if you can’t make it, I’ll understand.”
There are a handful of such moments of genuine wit here, but for the most part this is a film much too in love with its own musings to deliver on any level. It’s meandering, incessantly self-referential, and plain dull.