There is no phrase in Danish for “game changer.” For so many reasons, this feels significant to understanding “Klown Forever,” a movie that doesn’t demand understanding so much as grit. If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of making acquaintances with Danish actors Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen, then you’re probably better off than the rest of us. For them, cringe humor is an Olympic event. It isn’t enough to curdle their fans’ guts with set-ups that can only lead to the most appalling punchlines possible, or to relish in such extreme comedic masochism that all we can do is gawp in silence, because if we laugh we might choke on our tongues. They have to corrode our spirits, too.
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Maybe that’s only fair, though: after spending eleven years playing twisted, narcissistic, boorish, careless versions of themselves, first in “Klovn,” the television series they created back home in Denmark, next in the 2010 film they adapted from their show, released in the U.S. as “Klown,” Hvam and Christensen’s souls must look like marble statues washed with acid rain. The least we can do is share in their degeneracy. In “Klown Forever,” there’s degeneracy aplenty, though not much in the way of innovation. Hvam and Christensen have a formula that works for them, and they stick to it with the same determination as their screen alter egos in their repeated attempts at ruining each other as well as themselves. The film doesn’t bother to update their schtick, and it doesn’t have to. Doubling down works just as well.
Hand it to Hvam and Christensen, they commit to their act. “Klown Forever” picks up six years after the events of “Klown,” as Frank and his wife Mia (Mia Lhyne) celebrate the christening of their newborn child; Casper is absent at the ceremony, but he shows up at the reception in time to nail Frank’s daughter’s nanny. (Classic Casper.) All isn’t well with the bosom buddies, though. Turns out that Frank, busy with being a dad (or not, per Mia’s gripes about his contributions as both father and husband), has drifted apart from Casper in the half decade and change since their last escapade, while Casper, sensing that he has nothing tying him down to Denmark any longer, has decided to shuffle on over to Los Angeles to boost his career.
And shuffle on he does. Once Casper jets out of Frank’s life, “Klown Forever” gains an altogether different identity from “Klown”: oddly melancholic and, put bluntly, a total bore. If that comes as a surprise, it shouldn’t. Casper might be a lout, a pig, a troublemaker, a crappy friend, and a wrecking ball crashing through the sanctity of your very existence, but damn if the son of a gun isn’t a party on two legs. It’s also no surprise that Frank immediately misses Casper, especially after he pores over the ghostwritten and to-be-published book composed in honor of their joint exploits, reminding him of all the good male times they’ve had doing bad male things. So he hops aboard a plane and makes for LA himself, all in the name of friendship.
From there, “Klown Forever” just becomes “Klown,” sans the child abuse and plus an excursion on American soil, ripe for sowing offense. It’s a missed opportunity of sorts that the film doesn’t find a way to invade safe spaces or violate trigger warnings, two buzz phrases of the day in our national discussions of propriety, sensitivity, and political correctness; then again, shoehorning in a few potshots at liberal college students isn’t really necessary when your entire movie is built to startle and stun. There’s very little Hvam and Christensen won’t do to drop jaws or earn a chuckle, which is what they typically aim for in the absence of the former. Taste isn’t to their taste. Disgust? That’s more like it.
This time it’s Frank, the bug-eyed schlemiel to Casper’s schmuckish lothario, who is charged with repulsing our palettes. In “Klown,” he’s an accident prone man who specializes in genital and gluteal mishaps; his misery is engineered by Casper’s trademark indiscretion and fuelled by his own ungainliness. In “Klown Forever,” Frank goes the distance by himself, whether he’s molesting dreamcatchers or clearing out an entire party with petty racism. He’s such a tool that nobody bats an eye when Adam Levine, one of the film’s many celebrity guests, publicly cusses him out. Casper provides the stage for Frank’s humiliation, but the effort is all Frank.
Finding a point to their rowdiness, ribaldry, and rivalry, though, is a challenge. “Klown” kept an underlying sweetness as the anchor for its bawdiness, seen mostly in Frank’s relationship with Mia’s nephew, Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen, who reprises his role in a brief cameo). Hvam, Christensen, and returning director Mikkel Nørgaard remove any trace of compassion from “Klown Forever” outright: Frank and Casper feud back and forth in perpetuity, their nastiness a cycle that they can’t break free from. Even the film’s final scene denies us resolution. As soon as these disgraceful Danes end one squabble, the script (written, of course, by Hvam and Christensen) lays down the foundation for another. There’s no succor here. Even the film’s secondary human beings are amoral, duplicitous scumbags who only act upstanding.
Maybe there’s comfort in the knowledge that Frank and Casper are just two awful people among many, but that’s sort of like comparing dengue to zika. The real kicker is that they’re excellent at what they do. Wannabe shock comedies toe boundaries of decorum but don’t have the stones to cross them, which in a way is more off-putting than the alternative. For Hvam, Christensen, and “Klown Forever,” boundaries aren’t a problem, only substance, but if you’re looking for a moral or a message, then you’re looking at the wrong film. [B]