What Jack Built (Short, 2015)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Timothy J. Cox
Directed by Matthew Mahler
I guess you could subtitle this one “How to Build a Better Mousetrap” – that is, if what was being caught WAS a mouse. In Matthew Mahler’s short film What Jack Built, we witness a determined man (Cox) spend the majority of this 11-minute display doggedly creating some sort of trap, possibly in the hopes of snagging something that’s lurking in the woods. He hammers, measures, cuts, re-wires, and eventually sets up this boxed device, rigged with locking slide bolts on all sides, and we wait… and wait.
We actually don’t wait too terribly long, but it sure felt like it, and for an 11-minute display, this felt like watching a rerun of “This Old House” from the early 80’s – that’s how tedious this was to get through. Just a guy concocting a trap for whatever he was attempting to capture, and then before you knew it, the credits rolled. I’d love to offer up somewhat of a score for this one, but with no dialogue, no action, and no discernible reason other than to lay a snare out in the woods for an undisclosed creature, or man, or man-creature, this one quickie accomplished one thing, and that was to bore me to near tears.
I’ll give a couple of pity points solely for the ingenuity of the creation, but that’s all I can honestly muster at this point. My advice? Toss back a few Tylenol PMs if you want to hit the hay in record time, as this will run a very distant second place to self-medication. In other words, What Jack Built didn’t add up to jack shit.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
