In some ways "The Coca Cola Kid" may be the weirdest movie famously bizarre Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev ever made.
At least with his most out there material such as "WR:Secrets of the Organism" and "Sweet Movie", there was a sense that a sure hand was behind all the strangeness on screen. Even if you didn't get it you knew it meant something or had some purpose.
The Coca Cola Kid is a movie without purpose. It is one of those obscure '80s movies that assumes a left-field plot guarantees a worthwhile story. It doesn't.
What amazes me is that a filmmaker with such an indelible style as Makavejev was responsible for this yawn-fest. Any filmmaker could have made it.
The film stars Eric Roberts as an eccentric, unknowable executive of the Coca Cola company who wants to find out why a town in Australia doesn't use Coke products. So he travels all the way from America to the bush to solve this life altering mystery. There he meets a young lady played by Greta Scacchi who wanders through the movie like a dense Susan Sarandon. She has a daughter played by a pretty bad child actress, and they have a weird bathing scene together which is probably the only reason anyone today would watch this mess.
I didn't care at all about anything that happens in this movie. I didn't care about the characters, and some of the comedic subplots or side characters were just boring and stupid, like the hotel busboy who is convinced that the Eric Roberts character is really a secret agent for no reason other than the movie needed comic relief in those scenes. If you are going to have a buffoonish character who the audience should laugh at, it helps to actually have some sense of why or how the character arrived at their misunderstanding. Are they crazy, or stupid, or both? The character appears to be neither, so it seems totally forced and unbearable every time he is on screen.
The Coca Cola Kid may be an even bigger mystery than Sweet Movie, but the mystery is not contained in the material, it was there at inception: why did Makavejev make this mess?
At least with his most out there material such as "WR:Secrets of the Organism" and "Sweet Movie", there was a sense that a sure hand was behind all the strangeness on screen. Even if you didn't get it you knew it meant something or had some purpose.
The Coca Cola Kid is a movie without purpose. It is one of those obscure '80s movies that assumes a left-field plot guarantees a worthwhile story. It doesn't.
What amazes me is that a filmmaker with such an indelible style as Makavejev was responsible for this yawn-fest. Any filmmaker could have made it.
The film stars Eric Roberts as an eccentric, unknowable executive of the Coca Cola company who wants to find out why a town in Australia doesn't use Coke products. So he travels all the way from America to the bush to solve this life altering mystery. There he meets a young lady played by Greta Scacchi who wanders through the movie like a dense Susan Sarandon. She has a daughter played by a pretty bad child actress, and they have a weird bathing scene together which is probably the only reason anyone today would watch this mess.
I didn't care at all about anything that happens in this movie. I didn't care about the characters, and some of the comedic subplots or side characters were just boring and stupid, like the hotel busboy who is convinced that the Eric Roberts character is really a secret agent for no reason other than the movie needed comic relief in those scenes. If you are going to have a buffoonish character who the audience should laugh at, it helps to actually have some sense of why or how the character arrived at their misunderstanding. Are they crazy, or stupid, or both? The character appears to be neither, so it seems totally forced and unbearable every time he is on screen.
The Coca Cola Kid may be an even bigger mystery than Sweet Movie, but the mystery is not contained in the material, it was there at inception: why did Makavejev make this mess?