AllMovie

Ho hum. Another middling portrait of suburban anomie made possible by the success of American Beauty, The Chumscrubber is distinguished only by having a title that sounds vaguely indecent. There's no one cleaning up shark food -- the title refers to a video game character -- but there are plenty of dolphins, as the town's mayor (Ralph Fiennes) becomes unhinged and begins painting them all over his house. This is just one bit of counterfeit eccentricity that goes nowhere in Arie Posin's film, and Fiennes is just one of the all-star cast this movie wastes -- an entire 13 of whom are enumerated on the poster, in an attempt at validating the movie via talent overload. Included in that number are Glenn Close, who plays a shell-shocked mother like she's auditioning for Bree's sister on Desperate Housewives; Carrie-Anne Moss, the would-be temptress who never actually tries to seduce any of her daughter's friends, in a bit of typical misdirection; and teen actor Lou Taylor Pucci, seamlessly transitioning from thumbsucking to chumscrubbing. Freshman director Posin has one message he rams home in increasingly unsubtle ways: adults are self-involved careerists, and their children fill the parental void by doing drugs and kidnapping each other. This notion could have made for wicked satire if it had been pushed over the top. But Posin's story (co-written with Zac Stanford) falls in a sorry middle ground -- enough under the top that it's going for realism, but too out-there to be grounded. Another fatal flaw is how low/boring the stakes are, as characters shuffle from one location to the next without any sense of momentum toward tragedy, or even tragicomedy. By the time a bunch of characters get accidentally dosed with ecstasy -- a genre cliché if there ever was one -- The Chumscrubber has deteriorated into nothing but a joke.