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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Brave New Jersey is a big letdown

BRAVE NEW JERSEY (Jody Lambert). 86 minutes. Opens Friday (August 4). See listing. Rating: NN


You know that story about how America freaked out on the night of October 30, 1938, when half the country heard Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds and thought it was real?

Yeah, well, the stories of the chaos were probably exaggerated. But the idea of reasonable, decent people losing their minds over a Halloween radio show is a fertile one, and every now and then someone takes a run at dramatizing it. (There’s a 1975 TV-movie, The Night That Panicked America, that isn’t half bad.)

Jody Lambert’s Brave New Jersey wants to take a whimsical look at that night, telling the apparently true story of the people of Lullaby, New Jersey, who swallowed Welles’s story whole and set about manning the barricades, hoping to prevent angry Martians from taking over their town.

Could it work? Absolutely. (Hell, just think of the musical possibilities.) But director/co-writer Lambert, who co-wrote the Chris Pine/Elizabeth Banks dramedy People Like Us, misses its mark at almost every turn.

He clearly wants the film to play as a comic farce, and he’s assembled a strong cast that includes Veep comrades Tony Hale and Dan Bakkedahl, Miss Congeniality’s Heather Burns, Pitch Perfect’s Anna Camp, The Last Man On Earth’s Mel Rodriguez and all-purpose sneery guy Raymond J. Barry as various townsfolk caught up in the imaginary crisis.

Rodriguez scores one killer laugh about 20 minutes in, but that’s it. Lambert can’t find a tone that serves all his characters’ disconnected stories, and without a strong throughline the whole thing just turns into noise. 

He also fails to give the film any sense of time or place beyond the old-timey costumes, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if there was anything else to think about or invest in. It’s a pity.

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