Review: Take a Chance (C)

Released in 2006, Take a Chance is a minor romantic comedy directed by John Lyde (One Man’s Treasure, Money Or Mission) and starring a handful of familiar faces from the LDS film world.

Given its direct-to-DVD pedigree — and somewhat ordinary and predictable story — you likely won’t be expecting much from Take a Chance, and it will probably meet your expectations. Take a Chance has some pleasant characters you may like and root for, although there is about three too many of them for an effective narrative.

Take a Chance has some religious elements — not a surprise given the participants — but fails to take advantage of them, ignoring the one thing that could have set the story apart from convention.  The result is a film that’s fairly uninteresting in both story and theme.

Brothers Elliot and Eugene are two blue-collar working boys living in a small rural town in Texas. (I think the movie is okay with us calling them “rednecks”).  One day they meet Nathan, who is from Idaho selling pesticides for the summer.  When Nathan shows Elliot a picture of his twin sister Natalie, he (Elliot) is instantly smitten and immediately takes off to Idaho to try to meet her, dragging his brother along with him.

Once in Idaho, the two brothers need an excuse to get close to Natalie and her family, so they do the most logical thing…pretend to be foreign exchange students from Hungary who were scheduled to stay with her family for a while. (Right.)  While Elliot gets to know Natalie, Eugene meets two cute roommates named Cindy and Pam, either of which may have some relationship potential.  What happens when the girls start to like not who they are, but who they are pretending to be?  Can Elliot and Eugene successfully pull off this charade and get the girl(s) in the end?

Take a Chance is not a terribly original story – in fact, it’s very similar to the recent LDS film Suits on the Loose (the trailer for which is attached to the front of the DVD).  Two ‘fish-out-of-water’ individuals pretend to be people they are not, and encounter complications while maintaining their fake personas.  If you’ve already seen Suits on the Loose – or even if you haven’t – you can predict the arc of the movie on almost a scene-by-scene basis:  our protagonists attempt to fake their way into their new circle of friends, and are initially met with skepticism, then hesitant friendship, then something deeper…right when they get inevitably exposed as frauds.

A basic question:  would two rural, uneducated Texans have even a remote chance of successfully pretending to be Hungarian foreign exchange students?

In real life, the answer is obviously ‘no’…however, we don’t necessarily go to movies to reflect “real life”.  Many a movie has had a fundamentally ludicrous premise — like Take a Chance does — and turned out to be clever and entertaining.  Roger Ebert has a saying that what matters isn’t what a movie is about, but how it is about it.

The problem with Take a Chance isn’t the unrealistic premise, it is that it doesn’t defend that premise adequately through clever plotting and humor to make us buy into it.  There is a lot of comic potential in Eugene and Elliot having to make up reasonable sounding answers to basic questions about being Hungarian exchange students — and having to make up more details (or remember what they made up the first time) when follow-up questions are asked.

However, it becomes obvious during the film that Natalie and her host family refuse to ask any basic, realistic questions at all.

We get scenes where the family makes a Hungarian dish (from the Internet) that Eugene and Elliot have to pretend to enjoy, but not any obvious question about, “What foods do you eat in Hungary?” (“Uh…”).  We get a scene where someone who has studied Hungarian says a few words to them and Eugene and Elliot have to pretend they understand, but not the obvious questions like “So, how do you say ____ in Hungarian?” (“Uh…”)

We don’t get *any* of the basic questions that people in real-life would immediately ask two Hungarian exchange students who are living with them: “what’s life in Hungary like?”, “what do you do for fun?”, “Do you have any pictures of your homeland to share with us?”, “Can I see what your passport looks like?” to make Elliot and Eugene (and by extension the filmmakers) appropriately defend their disguise.  All the two leads — Kirby Heyborne (The RM) and Corbin Allred (Saints and Soldiers) — have to do is put on a Hungarian accent and they appear to be home-free in the disguise front.  The conceit of the film needs a little more realism than that if we’re going to buy in…

One of the strangest elements of Take a Chance is how coy it plays with its religious background. Its LDS pedigree is not really in question, given the director and the presence of several acting alums from LDS films. Take a Chance deliberately uses familiar LDS references and iconography — two young men riding bikes in white shirts, for example, with specific references to Utah and polygamy later – but then illogically tries to imply there’s no Mormon connection at all. (The two guys in white shirts riding bikes are just selling pest control, rather than preaching the gospel. And later, Natalie’s family attends a church service with visible crosses and prayer books – obvious non-LDS elements)

Some LDS films — Church Ball, for example — keep things religiously vague in an attempt to find a cross-over audience, while still being identifiable as LDS for those in the know. Take a Chance seems to be going out of its way to make viewers (even LDS viewers) think the characters *aren’t* LDS, as if this would detract from the film’s message. What’s wrong with the characters being Mormon?

To an LDS viewer, the attempt to mislead the audience could be insulting. We learn at the beginning that Nathan is:

1. From Idaho
2. His family is “very religious”
3. He doesn’t drink coffee, brandy, tea, or smoke tobacco.

Gee, what church would you think he belonged to?  (His family’s church services are on Sundays so we can count out 7th Day Adventists).

Later in the movie, Natalie reports on the different religions in their home town (Pleasant Valley, Idaho – a real town south of Boise): “We’ve got Baptists, Lutherans, Community of Christ, Amish, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, 7th Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers, and some Jews”.

Yes…but mostly Mormons.  It’s Idaho — 25% of the population is Mormon, by far the largest religious denomination.  Why pretend otherwise?

If the characters are Mormon, why hide it? If they are not, why use Idaho and a number of elements that suggest Mormonism in the first place? The movie could have been set just as easily in Kansas or Iowa, and irrelevant elements like the ‘white shirts on bikes’ visual, and the characterization of not drinking coffee, tea, or alcohol could have been dropped entirely.

Even if Natalie’s family’s specific church was identifiable, the subject of religion in general ends up being a red herring within Take a Chance.  We learn that Nathan’s family is supposedly super-religious, and when Elliot asks whether Natalie is dating anyone, Nathan says the family rule is that they “don’t date anyone who doesn’t believe like we do.”

It’s funny, then, when Natalie’s family starts commenting on how much time she and Elliot are spending together and how happy she seems, the religion issue is never brought up.  Since the Hungarian exchange students are clearly not Mormon (or whatever the family is supposed to be), no one brings up the obvious point that, according to the ‘rules’, they shouldn’t be dating at all.

Later, Natalie comments on how God is important in their community, and Elliot (in his Hungarian persona) says “In our country, God is insignificant”.  That sounds like a introduction for a deeper discussion of religion — especially since Natalie is supposed to care about Elliot’s religious beliefs and background — however, the conversation is then dropped immediately.  If God *is* that important to Natalie and her community, wouldn’t she naturally continue the conversation and talk about why God is important to her?  In context Natalie never shows any strong beliefs in God or religion, and couldn’t care less what Elliot thinks about God, either.   Which just raises the question: why bring up religion at all if it is ultimately irrelevant to the story and the characters?

The plot is not exactly airtight in other areas.  Cindy is revealed to have a devious ulterior motive that defies even irrational analysis to explain (let alone rational analysis).   And — in the obligatory rom-com ‘complications’ between Eugene and Pam to cause them to split up for a time — Pam becomes offended when she overhears Eugene say he’s just using her to get to her roommate Cindy — apparently forgetting that the first time they met they had almost this exact conversation:

• Eugene: “Hey, Pam, I’m interested in getting to know your roommate Cindy!”
• Pam: “Sure.  But if you want her to notice you, you’d better let me help you.”
• Eugene: “Okay.”

(Seems clear to me…)

In the end, Take a Chance has pleasant moments, but is a missed opportunity — a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to do with either its story or theme.

Final Grade: C