SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Ploydsge just watch it!

Mehdi Hoffman There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

tedg A cornucopia of what I call "folding."Here is the setup: we have our standard inner representative, a detective. He is obsessed with understanding the world, so as to understand the "Darwin Effect:" people who do stuff so dumb they kill themselves, thereby taking themselves out of the gene pool. In basic shape, it is the standard noir form.As the story proceeds, he becomes himself one of these folk, providing some amusing episodes. By my count, that is two folds. Along the way, he is accompanied by a woman: part buddy, part love interest and part person-to-explain-to.Not content to stop there, this filmmaker piles it on and on.The thing is framed as a documentary. There is a film student making his thesis film by following our hero. He is acknowledged frequently, but at the end the film slides into the disembodied camera we are used to seeing outside of the story. We often have the situation of the film we see, that has the camera within it, watching our guy watch things on the web.The detective has a second obsession: to catch a serial killer loose in San Francisco. This folds in an entirely different direction. The killer is a frustrated beat poet, so has confabulated a life as killer, "writing" on his acts. This actually makes sense. We have Lawrence Ferlinghetti appearing on screen as part of the detecting! The motive of the killer is teased out from a beat philosophy in an amazingly literate way.But the folding doesn't even stop there!Some of these Darwin Award episodes are possible urban legends; a key attraction of the Darwin awards website is that they verify (from news accounts) that the episodes really happened. A TeeVee show, mythbusters, checks others in dramatic ways to see if they were physically possible. The mythbusters hosts appear here as characters.One final neat fold. Our detective has a theory that the Darwin award candidates are that way because they are second children, and that they are trying to better their older sibling. This is elaborated a bit as the award candidates are proposed not as merely lethally stupid, but as living life to the fullest. There is an earnestness in the second child syndrome that the actor playing our detective has. He actually gets this across.But he is played by a man who has a much more successful older brother. A surprising number of the other important characters are also played by actors in an identical situation. Its pretty cool, but has been overlooked and not mentioned in any remarks I have read on this film.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

surge9000 It seemed a bit disjointed. I plan to watch it a couple more times, but I'm only writing this after the 1st viewing and I was mostly going 'Huh?' through the plot related bits. Partly because the actors were mumbling, and partly because I suspect there was a lot edited out that shouldn't have been. Y'know, so it fit into the typical 90 minute format.I've read nearly all of the darwin award incidences portrayed (as well as those that didn't qualify 'cos no one got killed, like the dense eurotrash girl that didn't understand cruise control). All of them were hilariously done. Or maybe I need to see a psychiatrist.Anyway, I LOVE intelligent, well thought out films you need to watch a few times to really 'get'. Warner Ho's- uh I mean, Bro's, have really found the sweet spot with their usual Batman films and so on. They always get good reviews 'cos they're so moronic, you only have to watch them once, but if you're the type thats utterly bored of that stuff, go see this instead.I laughed so hard at the frontmen of Mythbusters as illegal weapons dealers, I think it just cured my lung cancer. +1 point.And then there's the whole homicide investigator that faints at the sight of blood thing. +1 point. Mostly for not dwelling on it so long that it became annoyingly stupid. That could have been a disaster, but it was handled well. In fact, it was so well done, that I wonder if a lot of previous reviewers even saw the irony in it.And so on... In short; it's not 'Dr. Strangelove' brilliant, because it will age very fast (although I bet you a million bucks 'ol Stanley didn't think of that either, at the time), but it's pretty good now.

merklekranz While quite original in it's concept of studying people who kill themselves in incredibly stupid ways, the delivery is jumbled and not as entertaining as it might have been. If you were to lose the totally unnecessary documentary film maker and the ridiculous, cartoon-like serial killer, the movie would have benefited. When it is describing one of the outrageous idiots and their stunts, the film is in high gear. Unfortunately it repeatedly bogs down and this starting and stopping ruins the whole tone of "The Darwin Awards". I recommend simply checking out the idiotic segments and skipping the rest. This would have made a superior short, but as a feature it fails, because there is too much going on at once. Less would have been best. - MERK

misbegotten The Darwin Awards is a quirky little independent film, loosely based on the website & spin-off books cataloging the real-life stories of people who have suffered accidents caused by their own stupidity. Any individuals who are killed are posthumously given a 'Darwin Award' for improving Mankind's gene pool by removing themselves from it.The movie stars Joseph Fiennes as a police profiler whose unfortunate tendency to faint at the sight of blood (he's phobic) causes him to get discharged from the force. Finding employment with an insurance company, he's partnered with experienced, hot-shot investigator Winona Ryder, who specialises in bizarre and unusual claims. Together the two of them travel back and forth across America, examining various strange accidents.One of the things I liked most about this film is that the accidents that Fiennes and Ryder investigate are all based on well known urban legends, and such modern-day myths have always fascinated me. I own many books on the subject, and have enjoyed previous movies that have either used an urban legend as a starting point and then built a story around it (for example, Dead Man's Curve, When a Stranger Calls, and Lover's Lane), or have featured several legends (all three Urban Legends movies, and the anthology film Campfire Tales). Therefore, I got a huge thrill seeing several urban legends reenacted in The Darwin Awards.Although it's an independent production, the movie has an impressive budget and features many big name stars in cameos (including Chris Penn in his last role - he died the day before the film debuted at Sundance). However it went straight to DVD, both in America and here in the UK. I suppose it's hard to market an offbeat, character-led black comedy in which most of the laughs are generated by people getting either seriously injured or killed. Personally, I liked it a lot.