Guy X

Last night after Don's Delicious Gnocchi we settled down to watch Guy X. It was billed as a comedy and had a quote from the Daily Mirror stating that "Jason Biggs is a comic genius". Now, I pretty much ignore anything rated by the Daily Mirror because it's vacuous waste of a tabloid and its readers need re-educated. Nevertheless on the back it recieved 4 stars from Empire which is a respectable film magazine of whose opinion you can mostly rely on being correct.
Although at times the film may be considered black humour, the film is actually a drama and nothing like any of us expected, but in a good way. Biggs is dropped off on a runway expecting it to be Hawaii but instead it's Greenland, a US Military outpost for army losers. To quote the movie's tagline, there's been a fuck up, and they think he's someone else, a PIO [Public Information Officer] there to write a newspaper to keep up morale. However, Biggs falls in love with Sargeant Teal [played by a surprisingly non-annoying Natascha McElhone] and discovers a secret facility holding soldiers supposedly killed in action.

The film deals with isolation issues increased by the bleak location of the base and it's 6 month light and 6 month darkness periods of the northern hemisphere and how the soldiers cope with a crumbling routine because nothing ever happens in a remote US outpost during peacetime.

At worst it's watchable and at best it's more than the sum of its parts, Biggs delivering his finest performance to date [and that's not really saying much considering his past goofiness in the American Pie trilogy]. If you're looking for something a little bit different, I would say this film is a cross between M.A.S.H. and X-Files.

I would give this film 2.5 puffins out of 5.