Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Machine’ on Netflix, Bert Kreischer’s Crass, Dumbass Vanity-Project Comedy

The Machine (now streaming on Netflix) is a vehicle-slash-vanity-project for Bert Kreischer, the standup comic famous for his hard-partying, literally shirtless persona. For anyone not familiar with his shtick: Think Homer Simpson, but far less redeemable; for what it’s worth, he’s also the real-life inspiration for the title character in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. Kreischer’s most popular bit is a true-but-embellished saga about how he traveled to Russia during college and got so drunk and tangled up with the local mafia, he ended up robbing his classmates and, thanks to an English-to-Russian translation mishap, became known as “the Machine.” That bit went viral after he shared it on Joe Rogan’s podcast (you may groan here), and now it’s the basis of a movie, which finds Movie Bert going back to Russia with his estranged father, played by Mark Hamill, who inspires us to want to jump into the screen and rescue him from this dumb, loud, bloated endeavor. Then again, he’s an adult, and got himself into this, but that doesn’t mean you have to join him.

THE MACHINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Bert (Kreischer) is in therapy. He obviously needs it, since his wife LeeAnn (Stephanie Kurtzuba) and two daughters Sasha and Tatiana (Jessica Gabor and Amelie Villiers) are in the session with him, and he proudly tells the doc that he’s shown significant growth by ceasing to call his female family members the c-word. That’s not nothing, I guess, but it’s also barely something, and either way, I can’t wait to invite him to my next barbecue! But that isn’t the only way Bert has f—ed up – he got plowed and had Sasha drive him home even though she doesn’t have a license, and when they got pulled over and she got arrested he livestreamed the whole thing. How he’s still married is up there with the mystery of the Sphinx. And now that all this is established, who out there wants to spend the next 110 minutes with him? Any takers? At least in the hope that we get to see him messily devoured by plague-stricken banana slugs?

This is what happens when one’s hard-drinking, hard-partying slobbo standup comedy persona seeps into one’s civilian life, I guess. Bert’s attempt to smooth things over with Sasha is to throw her a sweet-16 party and do his damnedest not to make it all about him. Easier said than done, since his estranged father Albert (Hamill) shows up to unearth all manner of daddy issues, and add a thick layer of passive-aggressiveness to the birthday cake. And then a Russian gangster named Irina (Iva Babic) crashes the party, points a gun at Bert and forces him to fly to Russia and help her find her mob-boss father’s prized pocketwatch, which Bert had something to do with during his infamous drunken, crime-ridden college trip. Albert goes with him, apparently seizing an opportunity for some long-overdue father-son bonding. Now, if Bert was my offspring, I’d be tempted to render him an amnesiac and leave him in Siberia. One could surmise that Albert feels somewhat responsible for raising such an imbecile and therefore should play a part in his potential redemption, but maybe that’s just me projecting moral responsibility onto a movie when it generally has none.

So they get to Russia and it’s just shenanigans after shenanigans, cut with flashbacks to Young Bert (Jimmy Tatro) being the 20-something pissant bro whose misadventures in Russia made him the highly successful 50ish pissant bro he is now. Since this plot involves mobsters, that means there’s instances of high-larious violence, some of it high-lariously graphic. And since it also involves flashbacks, there are countless turn-of-the-century references ranging from Limp Bizkit to Austin Powers. You’ve been warned. And since it involves Bert Kreischer, there’s liquor and powdery drugs and a national treasure like Hamill uttering the line “she’s got the cushion for the Pushkin” – and a mighty struggle to give a single good god damn about any of it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, you have a call on line one. Also, Sebastian Maniscalco’s About My Father followed a similar track – it’s based on his standup act and persona, and farts around with a strained father-son relationship. One key difference? About My Father is actually funny on occasion.

Performance Worth Watching: Hamill is actually the closest thing to funny in The Machine – I have to admit his lecherous delivery of the “Pushkin” line momentarily cracked the stone face I wore throughout the rest of the film.

Memorable Dialogue: This line perfectly sums up the signature blend of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement that characterizes Kreischer’s persona: “I went to Florida State. All we know how to do is fight, drink and f—, and I can’t f— worth shit!”

Sex and Skin: What would a crude-ass movie like this be without a close-up shot of an old man’s pasty white butt? (And somehow, perhaps miraculously, it doesn’t give us a close-up shot of an old man’s droopy nuts.)

Our Take: The underlying message of The Machine is, um… don’t be a gross, overbearing f—head? A more ambitious movie might address the psychological conflict between a comedian’s stage persona and his true self; even mentioning the idea of an identity struggle in this context is a mistake, since it implies that the movie gives it even the slightest bit of lip service to it, when it really doesn’t. In fact, the story finds Bert resisting the coarse impulses that got him in trouble, learning that doing so means he’s not being himself, and then, rather predictably, unleashing the full “Machine” during the big action-packed climax. You can’t be Superman if you don’t allow yourself to fly, I guess.

Along the way, we endure a deathless running joke about Kreischer’s man-boobs, and utter the occasional prayer for Hamill as he plays second fiddle to a character who’s a nominally sentient personification of damp flatulence. There’s some potential for an examination of complex father-son dynamics here, but it doesn’t get any deeper than, hey, fathers exist, and being one is hard! I’m afraid anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated into the world of Bert “The Machine” Kreischer will struggle to find entry via this movie, which is too long, too stupid and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is.

Our Call: The Machine? More like Throw it Into a Ravine! SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.