It’s one thing to make a movie that relies on secrets and mysteries, never explaining everything – but then you lose the viewer. Something has to make sense. We get tired of being jerked around. Your movie can’t be the equivalent of a child saying “I know something you don’t know!” for 2 hours. The audience won’t hang around for forever.

But the other extreme is equally bad, where a movie anxiously contorts itself into a pretzel trying to “make sense”, killing all imagination and wonder in the process. As the line goes, explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better…but the frog dies.

Donnie Darko somehow combines the bad aspects of both, creating a specious dream narrative burdened that somehow possesses the need to literalize itself with scientific explanation.

The premise is tantalising. A troubled young man is called from his room by a figure in a rabbit suit – this apparent saves his life, for a jet engine crashes into his room as soon as he leaves.

The story soon becomes muddled, and the director’s cut merely shines an extra 10 watt bulb into the murk. Donnie has obviously been saved for a reason…but what? It seems time travel is involved. Something about multiple universes. Donnie travels from place to place at the behest of Mr Rabbit Suit, doing various things, but there’s a layer of confusion preventing them us from seeing the higher purpose. It’s like playing an adventure game when you can’t work out what you’re supposed to do, so you just blindly click on everything in sight.

Donnie Darko has style – all kinds of style. But what, ultimately, is it doing? It’s not a departure into the Land of Lynch – the movie obviously has rules, it’s obviously humming along to some hidden tune we can’t hear. It invites logical analysis…but sadly, logical analysis gets turned away at the door. Sorry sir, you aren’t on the guest list.

It does give an unsatisfying, fairly thin scientific non-explanation for the events in the book. The wonderfully creepy atmosphere is immediately dispersed like fart gas when Donnie starts reading about what’s happening in a helpful textbook called The Philosophy of Time Travel. Stupid. Who thought this was a good idea?

Ultimately, we never know the full story of Donnie’s strange experiences. There are fansites dedicated to explaining this movie, especially its profoundly confusing final scenes. Explanations coil around and around on themselves until you’re left with no choice but to think “why even analyse this? It’s a nonsense. There’s no way, given these facts, to arrive at a consistent conclusion.” Normally you can make any bizzaro version of a theory work by adding enough epicycles and equants, but not here. Where, ultimately, does the aircraft engine come from? The real world, or Donnie’s “tangental” one? Neither makes sense. This movie is impervious to reason.

This movie annoyed me to a degree that probably isn’t healthy. I wonder if the director can furnish answers about this movie. Someone should beat it out of him – my suggestion is with a jet engine.

Tim and Eric’s comedy is about weapon-grade awkwardness. They’re the kings of off-kilter timing, inexplicable malapropisms, garishly slapdash special effects, and reaction shots that last two seconds too long. Their style resembles banal daytime TV fed through some sort of cosmic dislocator so that everything is 10-15% off.

Although in this case, it’s more like a banal direct to video movie. The premise: the Schlaaang corporation gives Tim and Eric a billion dollars to make a movie, which they squander on diamonds, helicopter rides, and a $500,000 a week spiritual guru. When they deliver a ridiculous 3 minute film starring a Johnny Depp impersonator, an enraged Tommy Schlaaang orders them to pay back the billion dollars. Destitute, they end up hiding at a derelict mall while ducking Schlaaang’s thugs.

Tim and Eric adjust to their new home, which is filled with such oddities as a used toilet paper store, a sword salesman who earns money by not selling swords, and a man-eating wolf that stalks the food court. They make friends, and enemies, and learn an important lesson: sometimes you gotta bring knives to a gunfight.

Some scenes perfectly nail the uncomfortable Tim and Eric vibe (there’s an almost impossible to watch scene where Eric starts to loudly masturbate off-camera, and it doesn’t let us go until he reaches his climax). Other scenes drag like hell, and have little energy. There’s a scene where Tim and Eric are trying to buy the mall from a neurotic Will Ferrell, and he forces them to watch Top Gun not once but twice. It probably sounded hilarious on paper. On screen, you’re thinking “okay…feel free to go somewhere with this any time, boys.”

This movie exposes the limitations of the Tim and Eric format, which is that they have trouble sustaining interest in their schtick for long periods of time. They were at their best in Awesome Show, Great Job, where they bombarded you with sketch after sketch. While you were still recovering from a left hook, in swings the right. But the artistic strictures of film means they have to keep scenes going, and going, and going…and the cider goes flat. They rely on the unexpected, and too much of the unexpected means your tastes adjust downward like a pupil under a bright light. Their ironic kitsch starts to seem like genuine kitsch. Their awkward pauses and affectations seem like random stupidity.

It’s fun to be in Tim and Eric’s world, but honestly you don’t want to be there for long. Billion Dollar Movie is like spending 94 minutes on a roller coaster. Fun at first, but after a certain point you just want to get off.

Disclaimer: if it has “James Rolfe” or “AVGN” on it, I am there, wearing the t-shirt. Say what you will about his writing and acting skills, the concept he had (a foul-mouthed nerd plays and critiques “shitty games that suck ass”) made him one of the original Youtube viral successes, and he never had to lip-sync an embarrassing europop song to do it.

That said, here comes the pain.

What can I say about the long-awaited AVGN movie? It isn’t funny. It consumed a quarter of a million dollars, several years of James’ life, and deprived us of countless AVGN episodes…and I sat in my seat, waiting nearly two hours for it to get good. I laughed about three times. Mostly because the movie was trying so damn hard that I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. It uses the “two people sound like they’re having sex but they’re actually doing something different” gag. That’s the kind of screenplay-level desperation we’re dealing with here.

The concept behind the movie is the notoriously bad Extra-Terrestrial videogame for the Atari 2600 (which killed the early videogame industry, was mass-buried in landfill, blah blah, everyone knows the story). Remember how it became a running joke that James would refuse to review that game? Well, he’s finally doing it. But why the chickenshit renaming of “ET” to a fictionalised game called “Eee-Tee”? It’s not as if isn’t selling DVDs full of copyrighted game footage already.

The film’s surprisingly talky and elaborate for a character normally associated with scatological profanity and temper tantrums. Soon we learn about government conspiracies and Area 51 and alien baddies. Is there a need for this stuff? We just want to see James doing his thing: ripping on shitty games. Instead we’ve got him uncomfortably acting out weird, not especially funny scenarios with a cast of characters we don’t care much about.

The problem isn’t the small budget – Blair Witch was made for less. The problem is James: and his comedic limitations. Here’s the harsh truth: he isn’t a jack of all trades, able to sing and dance and conjugate sixteen versions of “shitwaffle”. He lucked his way into a format that he was well-suited for (10-20 minute web shorts)…but that’s pretty much where his talents end. I have no desire to see him in full-length movies with actual storylines. And the moments in his AVGN videos that get high-flown and pretentious (the R.O.B. video, anyone?) are the precise moments when I set Youtube’s playback to 2x speed.

The movie winds to its conclusion, and we get to the high point: the review of ET…Or “Eee-Tee”, I guess. It’s kind of quiet and dispirited, low on rage and profanity, but it’s the best part of the movie, because it’s honest. James comes to the realisation that ET isn’t the worst game ever made, and that the problem is with us, and how we manage our expectations. One feels justified in thinking he might be talking about the movie, too – how some people expect the moon on a fucking stick, when sometimes you have to enjoy something for what it is.

That’s what I think he’s saying, anyway. But I took a different lesson from it: know your limits. James is a great web comedian. But he’s never going to be a movie star, and this movie writes “QED” on that statement with permanent ink.