Ego Trip

Riches and success have spoiled a maturing talk show host to the point where his livelihood is threatened.

He built his career by connecting with people, and relied heavily on personal experience to humorously grind his convictions.

But since his experiences have become posh and lavish, his jokes have lost their charm, sowing contempt where once there was laughter, derision calibrated to applaud.

Yet hypothetical redemption presents itself in the form of a trip to Haiti, an engagement with humanitarian aid, a battle for surefire sanctity.

Age then counters youth, as his psychological economics, his current and past selves, egotistically contend, a confrontation worthy of Scrooge, a curriculum ripe with iridescence.

And errors.

Ego Trip's last half hour or so excels at delivering a finely tuned transformation, but its build-up is lacking in finesse.

I don't think the film's form was deliberately sabotaged to reflect Marc Morin's (Patrick Huard) temperament, I think there were too many people calling the shots behind the scenes, the result, messy and conspicuous.

You sort of know exactly what's going to happen, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as critical moments capable of developing character are cut short again and again, and subplots are introduced to struggle aimlessly or far too briefly, you kind of wish an additional 18 minutes weren't cut out, that they had taken more time to adhesively bind.

A lot of the scenes don't seem to fit as part of a whole, they're lacking in rhythmic sustainability, like a series of misplaced staccatos, rushing by far too quickly, at too choppy a pace.

Morin's life is choppy but Ego Trip's form could have found other ways to express this, potentially through a subtle infusion of self-awareness to metamalign his misplacements.

Much more could have been done with Sammy's (Gardy Fury) character.

Note: I didn't take to the urine jokes, but they did make me almost throw up, that type of humour often intended to generate such a response, good work.