The Pharmacist

The Pharmacist's bland yet perky narcoleptic metainsouciance is amphetamanic.

For the first half anyways.

Not that the second half isn't worth sticking around for.

Let me explain.

Writers Christopher Craddock and Indy Randhawa seem well aware of what audiences may be expecting from a typical run-of-the-mill romantic comedy.

The delivery of The Pharmacist's early lines suggest that this awareness is mobilizing a derogatory hyperreflexive irreverent crude yet sympathetic aesthetic, wherein it's difficult to distinguish the zingers from the platitudes, inasmuch as the material presented can potentially appeal to myriad disillusioned tastes, succeeding scenes observe their predecessors with witticisms which motivate the actual plot, the metaplot, and the meta-double-down (the plot which suicidally yet fertilely recognizes how this device has been played as well as the sycophantic yet authoritative intricacies of its institutionalization [I like this form {in films}]), the ways in which the subtitles are showcased will hopefully become an industry norm, while the protagonist, a Franco-Albertan pharmacist suffering from narcolepsy, continuously drifts off, which, during the film's first half, with the help of animation and various changes of setting, genre, etc., metaphorically harnesses multimedial synergies in which a fluctuating banal surreal jaunty consternation unpredictably flourishes.

I was hoping the multimedial influence would sustain the unpredictability, but the film eventually settles on a somewhat glum consistent course, whose insufficiencies are despondently yet quirkily ironed out beforehand, which would have caused me to think its course was tragic if its hyperawareness didn't make me think it was giving me the finger, not that I don't appreciate that, and during the second half I did keep drifting off and then refocusing, as if the film's narcoleptic amplitudes were catching, and the ways in which The Pharmacist gives-'er are commendable, the audaciously meek Mad Dog, pharmaceutically gettin'-'er-done.

What else?

The film feels oppressed by its own design. This is often hilarious.

It would have been nice if there were no reconciliations.

Just brainy underground shape-shifting embers.

No need for generalized coherency in such films.