Choke (2008)

Directed by Clark Gregg. Starring Sam Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, Clark Gregg, Gillian Jacobs, Bijou Phillips, Jonah Bobo, Joel Grey, Paz de la Huerta. [R]

Film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s darkly comic cult novel lacks cohesive ideas and never sorts out what it’s idiosyncratic characters are all about. Sam Rockwell is well-cast as the antihero, Victor Mancini, a cynical sex addict working as a re-enactor at a colonial village, supplementing his income by conning people at restaurants. The grift: he forces himself to choke on food, and the rescuers tend to feel a sense of responsibility over the life they’ve saved and send him money afterward. Has its moments, but the movie struggles to capture Pahalniuk’s tricky, acidically subversive voice, and can’t find a consistent tone of its own, satirical or serious, mordant or sincere. Flings itself this way and that, even suggesting at one point that Victor is the Second Coming of Christ after his loony (now hospitalized) mother (Huston) stole Jesus’ foreskin(!) in Italy, but it all adds up to far less than what culminates in the novel. Directorial debut for Clark Gregg, who plays Victor’s uptight boss; sex addict group member Joel Grey was his then-father-in-law

53/100