On the Count of Three (2021)
In theaters and streaming
Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) earnestly plot their own demise
The set-up is a joke, right? Two men don’t point loaded guns at each other’s heads and vow to shoot one another on the spot, do they? In this movie’s opening minutes, it looks like they just might. Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott), friends from childhood, have made a spontaneous decision to jointly commit suicide. They seem to believe this will render their personal bond that much purer. As the movie begins, in a back alley behind a strip club, they hold the weapons point blank to each other’s heads and start counting. When they reach three, the fatal shots are to be fired.
Well, not yet. Kevin pleads for one more day, so they can use their last day on earth to do anything they’d like, including settling old scores. In a flashback to earlier in the day, we learn some of what’s brought the men to this point, how the despair they’re feeling has grown unbearable. Val is in a dead-end job, literally shoveling mulch all day. He’s in a “relationship” with a woman who no longer takes his calls, and he has a horrific history with his brutal father. Adding his life up, he makes an unsuccessful attempt to strangle himself with his belt in a restroom stall.
Further depressed at failing to pull off the endgame, Val abruptly quits his job and goes to visit his old friend Kevin, who’s in a rehabilitation facility – one of many he’s been in since childhood. He’s in this one after making the latest of several attempts to kill himself by swallowing pills. We see him try to con a counselor into releasing him, insisting that he wants to live, but she’s not having it. So, he unleashes a self-destructive rant, wondering if the mantra that “all lives have value” is a cruel deception. She coolly informs him that his confinement will continue.
Val offers Kevin a mutual suicide pact. Kevin accepts and through a ruse, they manage to free Kevin from the facility. For the rest of the movie, the two are on the run, ready to settle scores, rearrange their lives, and ultimately bump each other off.
This nihilist dark comedy is standup comedian Carmichael’s directorial debut, and he does arresting work. The screenplay by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch lets the two actors play off one another with crisp agility. Val is the melancholic who can’t lift himself out of a self-defeating funk, and Kevin is the “rebel” who’s never been able to find self-worth under the pain heaped on him as a child. With help from the glowing, translucent lighting of cinematographer Marshall Adams, these two seem at loose ends, but with sharp dialogue and nicely timed comic delivery, we gain a sense of what’s weighing them down.
Val tries to save his faltering relationship with his girlfriend Tasha (a blistering Tiffany Haddish), only to be icily told that she’s not interested until he gets professional help. His father (J.B. Smoove) not only beat him as a child but robbed him as an adult. When Val tries to recover his money, the older man inflicts further violence (until Kevin stops him cold). Kevin tries to exact revenge on the psychiatrist (Henry Winkler) who molested him as a child, only to have the attempt backfire on both himself and Val.
Val and Kevin are impressed with the feeling of power that comes with wielding a gun
The day’s mayhem comes down to a final chase, glimmeringly, even poetically, staged and shot. But this high-speed conclusion doesn’t actually confront the dire issues of abuse, suicide and gun violence that the movie has milked for most of its running time. The script leaves us wondering how committed the filmmakers were to exploring them in the first place.
Something else is driving the movie. Carmichael is turning his comedy darker – that’s the career trajectory here. And he opens up for himself a double pathway back, in future work, to hilarity or to bleakness. He can do both. Pull the trigger or not. First as comedian, and now as actor and director, the guy’s got all kinds of nerve.
But I never entirely bought this movie’s premise, namely, that ending one’s life could make some sort of howling counter-statement to an indifferent world. As the script veered between hot comedy and chilling violence, Val's brutal, heartless father and Kevin’s pedophile child-psychiatrist felt like straw men. Do we know for a fact that abusers severely belittle their victims to the point where victims can take their own lives? Absolutely. And to its credit the movie addresses that poison.
But does it drain it? Is there any catharsis? The decision here to wreak vengeance on the abusers suggests that recrimination can relieve the pain and humiliation that transgressors inflict. But when is that ever true? You don’t destroy your abusers, who are often out of reach. You dismantle the part of them that wormed its way inside you and made you devalue and abuse yourself. Their work was rounded off a long time ago. Decoupling yourself from it is the real inner journey.
I’m only suggesting that there’s one more volatile, vulnerable spot I wish Val and Kevin had put themselves in and not flinched: looking in the mirror.