In Action

This ultra low-budget, dimwit action comedy doesn't score any points by putting two screenwriters into the action of the movie they're writing.

I remember when "meta" came into vogue a few years ago. It was one of those words a lot of people used but when asked to define it, no one really had a solid answer. Mostly it seemed to describe ideas, particularly self-referential ones, that sounded good at first blush but were rarely executed memorably.

That certainly describes "In Action," which bills itself as the first two-person action movie. It stars Sean Kenealy and Eric Silvera, who also directed and wrote, playing versions of themselves as wannabe screenwriters who have an idea for an action movie and find themselves caught up in their own story. They're also the only ones who appear onscreen, though a few other figures appear whose faces we don't see, and I suspect that might be the same two dudes just in other outfits.

For the story-within-a-story, Sean and Eric play graduates of a college screenwriting program who were promising in their youth but have now become 30-something schleps whose creative careers aren't going anywhere. They meet up at wedding and, after trading numerous insults, decide to start writing together again.

Neither one appears to be terribly talented, and all their script ideas are hackneyed garbage. Finally they come up with the idea based on the real wedding of the president's daughter in a few months, inventing a terrorist attack to kill POTUS and a bunch of others.

After months of emails throwing around ideas and scenes, they find themselves caught in a real-life scenario neither one of them were expecting. Eric is the acerbic one who works in marketing in New York City, hating his life, his hairline, his marriage, etc. Sean is making it as a stay-at-home dad in Virginia, a nervous nebbish who refuses to use curse words, at least until the appropriate time.

It's not a terrible idea for a movie, but one better suited for a short film than a feature length one. Even at a spare 79 movies, it goes on waaaayyyy longer than it should. The whole middle of the movie gets swallowed by a dank, dark sequence where they're kidnapped by unnamed nefarious forces, possibly related to the government, that want to torture and squeeze them for information.

It eventually becomes clear that the people after Sean and Eric aren't looking to stop the attack on the wedding, but use their ideas to carry out a real one.

Things go through a variety of talky scenes where the guys are constantly ripping on each other, interrupted by brief, inept action scenes. For example, when they're running through some tunnels being pursued by the bad guys, it looks like they're just holding their phones and videoing themselves.

Occasionally the movie also segues into very basic animated sequences to show stuff they couldn't do in live action, like a fight in an elevator shaft that seems like something straight out of "Die Hard." Another uses action figures to mime out a climactic scene. Indeed, "In Action" often goes out of its way to reference well-known action movies and tropes.

I'm sympathetic to a couple of nobodies making their own movie vérité-style with no budget, but "In Action" is just a hard watch to get through. There are occasional bright spots or funny bits, as when they discuss Eric hiding contraband in his "grundle" area, surviving even when they're stripped down to their underwear by their assailants. But it's a lot of chaff to get through for very little wheat.