THE PACKAGE: Doesn’t Quite Fulfil The Promise Of Its Premise

‘Black comedy’ has turned out to be an oddly vague label in recent years. It suggests comedy based on disgusting, uncomfortable, or morbid events, but the reality of how this humour is produced on-screen doesn’t result in anything close to a neat, singular genre.

You have movies like The Lobster, which depicts a disturbing, absurd dystopian future and thrives on the resulting discomfort, and Shaun of the Dead, that places normal situations into a dark and violent context to produce laughs from the jarring atmosphere. Then you have films like the new Netflix Original The Package, which is centred around a gross scenario and does nothing worthwhile with it.

The Package

The inciting incident of The Package, whilst somewhat original, is one that could have been condensed down into a far shorter YouTube skit. Five friends, two of whom are twins, go out on a camping trip for spring break and drunken antics ensue. Unfortunately though, one of the inebriated friends decides to wave a knife around whilst peeing, and ends up chopping off a crucial part of his anatomy. He is taken away in a helicopter, and the remaining teens end up in a race against time to return his removed member to him, inevitably facing some absurd roadblocks on the way.

Yes, this is initially fairly shocking, and I personally never quite got over the gratuitous shots of a dismembered penis flying across the screen. But for me at least, this alone did not carry the one and a half hour runtime. Of course, The Package is padded out to an extent by two different romance subplots, both of which you see coming from a mile off, but both are completely irrelevant to the main joke and don’t do much to advance it.

Performances and Characterisation

This could be forgiven if the characters were more interesting or well-defined, but sadly they are mostly one-dimensional. The three male leads can be easily categorised into ‘nerd’, ‘creep’, and ‘goofy’, and each has all the expected tropes to go along with that. The two remaining female leads fare far worse, one defined by her past relationship with ‘creep’, and the other by her being the twin sister of ‘goofy’ and love interest for ‘nerd’. As much as I support involving more women in the gross-out genre and allowing them to get their hands dirty, personalities independent of the men would make this more meaningful.

I wouldn’t say that any of the performances in The Package were bad, but everyone in the main cast certainly wavered at some points, usually during the more over the top moments of comedy where they noticeably laugh or smile under their breath. I also found that Daniel Doheny went to some polar opposites, giving the most likeable performance next to Geraldine Viswanathan providing much of the semi-believable emotional core and yet frequently letting out an irritating scream as the butt of every joke based on him. As for the other three, their performances were serviceable, but not really noteworthy enough to make any kind of comment on.

Setup and…?

A fundamental concept in comedy is that of setup and payoff. A scenario sets the joke up, and a punchline provides the humour. The Package has a good understanding of the former, but often refuses to employ the latter. It starts early on, when ‘creep’ plays porn on the family TV at ‘nerd’s’ house, his younger brother gets upset, and absolutely nothing of consequence happens. The movie creates some absurd situations but does little with them aside from acknowledging them, most scenes ending on an awkward pause where a punchline should have fallen.

Whilst the setup for the jokes is decent though, some of the plot contrivances created to move the film forward are incredibly frustrating. At several points, the film is advanced due to a character spasming or flailing for no apparent reason and causing an object to fall, a device so distractingly bad that I’m shocked the writers had the courage to use it more than once.

Conclusion

The Package suffers from being a little too conventional for its own good. With a less predictable plot, more out-there characters, and a greater sense of surrealism and pure chaos, it could have been much more than the final product: a generic teen rom-com with a dissected dick slapped on top.

Do you think The Package stacks up well next to other Netflix Originals? Is it more gross-out or black comedy? Let me know in the comments!

The Package was released on Netflix worldwide on August 10, 2018.