NYC-based sketch comedy quartet Simple Town, who have performed live and in online shorts over the last decade, make an amusing leap to the feature-film format in “Big Break.” Ostensibly playing themselves, the group here gathers at a country manse to celebrate one member’s breakaway mainstream success — and for the other three to beg/cajole him into sharing that good fortune. Unbeknownst to the visitors, there’s an unhappy fifth party already in the house… and more than one homicidal maniac even within that small populace.
As in their prior work, the troupe’s humor is less a matter of sight gags or punchlines than a well-oiled ensemble dynamic that sends up Gen Y self-absorption, social awkwardness and passive-aggressive competition. It’s not a formula that generates huge laughs, and the material here is seldom all that inspired even as it playfully exploits horror conventions. Yet the results are fun and reasonably funny throughout, with astutely self-deprecating cast turns lent a modest but polished, fast-paced showcase in director Ian Faria’s feature debut.
Reuniting with long-incommunicado former collaborator Sam (Sam Lanier) is a very big deal to Caro (Caroline Yost), Felipe (Felipe Di Poi) and Will (Will Niedemann), as their neurotically argumentative drive to see him underlines. They must pretend they’re simply glad to spend the weekend at their good buddy’s pad, a sizable estate two hours outside Manhattan, since he’s finally invited them over. But they’re each none-too-quietly seething with covetous anxiety and resentment, particularly since the thing that skyrocketed Sam to Hollywood wealth and fame — writing an animated film called “The Gummy Bear Movie” — happens to contain a lot of lines and ideas that were once group property, used without attribution. The three are desperate to arm-twist their way into a slice of that future-career pie, though they can’t agree on how to broach the subject. No one is pleased when Will, having drunk too much alcohol way too fast, is first to blurt out a request-slash-demand.
