In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we’re digging into Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things, a comedy about bad people making terrible choices.
Very Bad Things is the debut feature from actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Berg would go on to direct projects with more prestige (Friday Night Lights), more special effects (Battleship), and more Mark Wahlberg (literally everything after Battleship), but his career as a writer/director begins here: With a film about unchecked male ego, the hysterical things people do when pushed to the breaking point, and how easily a bad idea can turn into a seemingly good one. It’s also, apparently, a comedy.
Office drone Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau) is about to marry his overbearing fiancée Laura (Cameron Diaz), and his buddies conspire to drag him out to Las Vegas for the requisite bachelor party. Lots of drugs and gambling ensue, and Boyd (Christian Slater) has even hired a stripper (pornstar Kobe Tai) to help the guys round out the night. A deeply coked-out Mike (PCU‘s Jeremy Piven) takes her into the bathroom for some sex and accidentally kills her. The guys all naturally freak out, very intentionally kill a security guard who shows up to check on the noise, and decide the best course of action is to cut up the bodies and bury them in the desert.
As the guys return home from Vegas, everyone is visibly on-edge, particularly mind-mannered family man Adam (Daniel Stern), whose all-consuming guilt threatens to blow everyone’s cover. There’s a great little sequence where they take Adam’s minivan to a car wash to get cleaned and detailed. Everyone’s sitting around in a stunned daze contemplating what they’ve just been through, except for Boyd, who’s having the time of his life standing in the corner playing a Mortal Kombat 4 arcade machine. (Hello, 1998!)
Boyd, you see, is a crazy person. He’s the mastermind of this entire affair. He’s the Best Man, so he’s one who set up the bachelor party, hired the stripper, and made the final decision to chop up the bodies, wrap them in plastic, and bury them in multiple suitcases in the middle of Red Rock Canyon. Boyd spends most of the movie being coldly pragmatic, espousing his worldview of looking at problems without any emotion attached, and generally just treating people like meat. The way Slater plays him, he lives his life without a shred of remorse. Some of the guys see him as a role model, something to aspire to, while the others see him as the loose cannon he clearly is. When the shit hits the fan, Boyd takes it upon himself to orchestrate their entire getaway plan. Almost like he’s done this before and, in all likelihood, will do it again.
“If you take away the horror of the scene, take away the tragedy of the death, take away all the moral and ethical implications that have been drilled into your head since grade one, do you know what you’re left with? A 105-pound problem that needs to be moved from point A to point B.”
So now we’ve officially entered Breaking Bad territory. Very Bad Things came out a full decade before Walter White ever had to figure out how to dispose of an unwanted corpse, but the attitude is largely the same. Berg is asking us not to condone his characters’ actions, but to understand how good people can find themselves in increasingly desperate situations. He doesn’t side with Boyd, exactly, but considering the fate of the more proactive Boyd versus the fates of complicit bystanders Kyle and Charles (Leland Orser), you get a pretty clear idea of Peter Berg’s worldview.
Then again, as five seasons of Breaking Bad taught us, these people are very much the villains of their own story. Of course the right thing to do would be to call the cops and turn Mike in immediately. Maybe he’d only be charged with involuntary manslaughter, and maybe the rest would only get a slap on the wrist for all the drugs lying around their hotel room. But doing the right thing means throwing a bro under the bus. Snaking its way underneath the movie’s litany of bad decisions is a very tangible “bros before hos” mentality that’s honestly a little gross. The only characters in the movie exhibiting any shred of maturity and responsibility are Kyle’s fiancee Laura and Adam’s wife Lois (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
Lois finds out what’s been going on from a confession Adam wrote before getting himself killed, and refuses to take the information sitting down. She at least goes down swinging, fighting for the survival of her family. Meanwhile Laura finds herself having to mop up after everyone’s poor choices, deciding that she’d rather have a perfect wedding than deal with the consequences of Kyle’s party like an adult. The movie ends with Laura realizing this whole thing is a hell of her own making, which seems particularly harsh given all she wanted was the perfect wedding.
The whole movie is a sick kind of cosmic joke where no one makes the right decision, and everyone is fittingly punished for their crimes. This is also supposed to be a comedy, but I think time has not been kind to it in that regard. The Breaking Bad comparison seems apt, as this sort of plot is the template for like half of the modern TV landscape. Is it compelling to watch five guys spiral out of control after one bad night? Sure. I can get behind that. Is it funny? No, not unless constant shouting, swearing and over-the-top mugging counts as funny. Compare this to the similarly pitched Rough Night nearly twenty years later. Same basic premise, gender-swapped into Scarlett Johannsen’s bachelorette party. Not a great movie either by any stretch, but it at least remembered that jokes are supposed to be funny.
As a calling card for Peter Berg, I think Very Bad Things works well enough. After this he directed The Rock in The Rundown, which more comfortably folds comedy into another genre, but soon he’d ditch comedy for political thrillers and summer blockbusters. He outgrew this kind of movie quickly, and I think that’s to everyone’s benefit. Very Bad Things is a lot of things, but funny isn’t one of them.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Favreau anchors the film as the groom in this bachelor party gone wrong, his first chance since Swingers to lead an ensemble. Though as the eternally timid Kyle, Favreau freely offers the spotlight to more conceited performers, like Christian Slater or his old PCU buddy Jeremy Piven1. He gets a few moments to let his leading man chops shine, but like any good groom, Kyle is the least essential part of this movie, so who really even cares?
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of 5). S’not great.
NEXT TIME: Jon Favreau eats lightning and craps thunder.
- Piven wasn’t the first choice to play Michael. The role was Adam Sandler’s before he dropped out to do The Waterboy instead. It was a solid career move on the Sandman’s part, as I just can’t picture him in any movie where he has to hook up with a stripper, accidentally kill her, and then intentionally hit Daniel Stern with a car. Then again, I’ve seen Uncut Gems, so what do I know? ↩︎
Leave a comment