Watching movies is a passion. I find joy in sitting in a theater or in my living room and watching something I've never seen before. Movies as a form of art are unique in the way they tell stories. It's sound, it's visuals, its dialogue. When they work in harmony it's a joy. When they are off it certainly becomes a chore to sit through. When they fail, it's a torturous experience. Might I borrow the words of Henry Higgins by saying that I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling than to ever see this movie a second time.
Dax Shephard (our blonde star who also "wrote" and "directed" this heap) based this movie on the TV show of the same name. The story follows two motorbike policemen (the California Highway Patrol) as they seek to write tickets and catch speeders. The second partner, Michael Pena, is actually an FBI agent undercover sent to solve a crime that involves a whole lot of stolen money and something about Ducati's and corrupt police officers. Can you guess what kind of movie this is?...
... A buddy cop movie. Obviously.
Let's not review the film based on what did and did not work. I would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of this film that is virtuous. As the cocky FBI agent, Pena plays a man who is both sex-driven and smart, where Shephard plays an ex-biker who is supposed to be the raging idiot of the pair. Not only do the two men have zero chemistry between them, but their characters are a baffling blend of illogic and idiocy. Usually in a story like this, we have the "straight man" and the "idiot." One is funny and one is not. I see that Pena is supposed to be the more relatable man in this group, but giving his character habits like frequent masturbation and a slapstick approach to riding a motorcycle (not to mention a fetish for lululemon), I realized only one thing: this film is garbage.
The two guys trudge through some of the most baffling and horrendous writing in a film that I can remember, moving from one scene to the next as a facade for a plot. This isn't a movie. It's an abomination. From the stupid penis jokes to the stupid sex jokes to the stupid gay jokes, it's one misfire after another in a movie that we watch with the literal fascination of watching a trainwreck. In fact a trainwreck would be arguably more fascinating to watch. The sheer fact that one man was able to make a movie this inept isn't the most surprising thing. It happens. I will give Dax Shephard credit as a director for having shots that are largely in focus and characters framed coherently. Hey, I'll be nice, that deserves at least half a star, right? The fact that Dax Shephard wrote, directed, and starred in this film only solidifies him as a candidate for being the "Orson Welles in Citizen Kane" of bad movies.
Chips is the movie equivalent of diarrhea. You know it's coming, you can't stop it, and you have to wait anxiously for it to run its course and end. The final product isn't something you would want to show to your friends, or to your loved ones. You wouldn't want to buy it at a store, nor would you want to think about it once it's all over. If someone talked about it over dinner you might lose your appetite. In fact before writing this review I had to Google the movie to make sure I even remembered the stupid title correctly. That was really the highpoint of this whole experience: that I could forgot about it even before I wanted to.
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