Phil is a player. He is a smooth-talking real estate agent who takes advantage of the opportunity to be alone with women in their houses and, well, take advantage of them. He seems to think he is invincible. But one day his ego gets the better of him and he ends up screwing his boss, Vivian. Unfortunately, the boss isn't about to let him get away with the “love 'em and leave 'em” mindset, and Phil finds himself in far deeper trouble than he ever bargained for.
Beat the Bastard Down is certainly a unique film, and not just because of its subject matter. It was completely unscripted and the entire film was shot in 32 hours with not much pre-planning. (And probably not much sleep either, I would imagine.)
This idea is certainly very ambitious, but I was a bit chagrined when first hearing the idea. Much as a completely improv film sounds like fun, it would likely be a total disaster as even the best actors cannot improv for much longer than five minutes without some sort of direction. But this movie did have more structure than I expected it would, although it was still pretty obvious that there was no script.
I was impressed with the acting; it certainly appeared that all involved had a lot of fun making this movie. There were even some moments that appeared to be accidental - one of Phil's "dates" breaking a window in his kitchen door, for example - but where actors were able to stay in character long enough so that these scenes could be used in the movie.
One of the problems with improv is that an actor can’t always remember what they’ve said a few minutes ago, so when given the chance to run off at the mouth, they tend to repeat themselves. This was quite obvious at several times within the film. Improv style also makes for very difficult edits, because no two takes are the same. In the movie The Score, director Frank Oz encouraged occasional improvisation between Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando, but in those scenes he always set up two cameras to get coverage of both actors. Without this coverage, one would need many, many takes, but with improv there are a limited number of takes one can do before the actors run out of ideas. It was obvious that there wasn’t a lot of coverage in these scenes, as some parts of them would clearly not be a favorite choice for an editor; in future projects, multiple cameras would definitely be a good thing for future work.
Another problem with improv is getting the story across in such a way that the audience understands it. This film starts with Phil and his friend Gerard giving instructions to another young man on their “rules” for getting laid. This sequence starts rather suddenly with almost no character introduction, and it takes some time to figure out what is going on. Given the comedic nature of the film, some sort of narration (such as in the TV show “Scrubs,”) or introducing the characters by captions (as Guy Ritchie did in Snatch) would have been good. Also, during this instructional session, there are a few flashbacks to show Phil at work, but there were no editing tricks that differentiated them as flashbacks. At the end of the movie, however, the flashback effect of undersaturation was used. It really should have been incorporated into all flashbacks, not just some of them.
