Delayed Reaction: On the Count of Three

Premise: Two friends agree on a suicide pact...but have to kill a few hours first.

 

I must say, this is a little annoying. For years, I've had to put up with all these Sundance dramas getting labelled as comedies just because they have a bunch of sitcom stars in them and are otherwise dramas. Now there's an actual Sundance dark comedy with people from sitcoms and on IMDB, it gets labelled as just a drama. I swear. I can't win.

 

On the Count of Three is a shaggy story with a pair of really strong leads. After a failed suicide attempt, Val's (Jerrod Carmichael) best friend Kevin (Christopher Abbott) is admitted to a psych ward. Val busts him out and reveals that he too wants to commit suicide. They agree to shoot each other on the count of three but decide at the last second to kill a doctor who wronged Kevin as a child first. The only problem is, the doctor's not in until the evening, so the two friends have a day to kill before the doctor. And that's basically the movie. The two friends each have a couple errands to take care of first, but mostly it's these two somewhat mismatched best friends driving around. And that's plenty for this movie.

 

It's a nice role reversal of sorts for Carmichael and Abbott. Carmichael is the stand-up comedian and Abbott is the more dramatic actor, but in this, Abbott's character by far gets more of the laugh lines and Carmichael is more interior and brooding. Abbott gets a lot of "liberal going bad" jokes, like embracing how fun it is to fire a gun. He's already given up on life and is happy to embrace the absurdity. Carmichael internalizes a lot me. He's stressed by the decision to end it all. Pretty early on, I gathered that he was exploring suicide due to something other than nihilism.

 

The film is directed by Carmichael and written by two writers from the show Ramy (one of whom also wrote for Carmichael's gone-too-soon NBC sitcom), and you can feel that mix of Carmichael's sly social commentary and Ramy's awkward dark humor in this. Toward the end, the movie flails around a little more than I cared for. It shifted the tone drastically and ended in a place that didn't really work for me, but I mostly enjoyed the ride.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend