Washington Post
June 7 2013
`Lost and Found in Armenia’ movie review
By Sean O’Connell, Updated: Friday, June 7, 8:33 PM
While vacationing in Turkey, the American son of a powerful U.S.
Senator accidentally parasails into the neighboring country of
Armenia. Mistaken by local government officials to be a Russian spy,
the man is mercilessly interrogated by his captors until a beautiful
female student breaks through the language barrier and comes to his
aid.
Convince someone along the lines of Daniel Craig or Clive Owen to take
the lead role and you’ve got the makings of a globetrotting political
thriller. Cast third-rate comedian Jamie Kennedy, though, and you end
up with `Lost and Found in Armenia,’ a broad, silly, dated and
insensitive mistake of a movie co-written and directed by Gor
Kirakosian.
`Lost and Found’ resembles those lowbrow, one-joke comedies Pauly
Shore used to crank out near the end of his film career, just to stay
employed – something like `Jury Duty’ or `In the Army Now.’ Kennedy
stars, but the majority of the movie leans on a mixture of Russian,
Azeri-Turkish and Armenian performers speaking in their native tongue.
As a result, `Lost and Found’ relies heavily on subtitles.
Unfortunately, reading the film’s immature jokes doesn’t make them
funnier.
Kennedy plays Bill, a senator’s son whose heart recently was broken by
a girl we never meet. His best friend, George (Dave Sheridan), coaxes
him to go on vacation to Turkey, where Bill is expected to forget this
shrew and start living life again. But the aforementioned parasailing
accident carries our clueless protagonist to Armenia, where he
contends with a village of suspicious peasants and eventually
befriends a beautiful college student named Ani (Angela Sarafyan).
Sarafyan, it should be noted, is strikingly beautiful, with an angular
face and feline eyes that convey concern and empathy when she has to
educate Bill on the hardships of life in Armenia. Because she’s the
only person in Armenia who understands English, she’s tapped to be
Bill’s translator and, obviously, his love interest. Kennedy,
meanwhile, isn’t asked to do much beyond reacting to a series of
idiotic sequences with a dumbfounded stare. He has that down pat.
Kennedy might be the only recognizable face in the ensemble, but he
largely takes a back seat as `Lost and Found’ wastes chunks of time on
the cartoonish physical antics of the Armenian townsfolk. Grandpa
Matsak (Mikael Pogosyan) acts as the town’s inept interrogator, prone
to shouting at Kennedy or hitting him with a boot. Ahmed (Serdar
Kalsin) is the camouflage-sporting village leader, who views himself
as the local dictator and suspects Bill as being part of a larger
espionage scheme.
These aren’t characters. They are one-note spoofs of cookie-cutter
`foreign’ stereotypes even Yakov Smirnoff would dismiss as tedious.
The last time this style of hackneyed cultural humor generated
significant belly laughs, episodes of `Hogan’s Heroes’ were an
audience’s only options. Forty years ago, Peter Sellers might have
been able to squeeze laughs out of this tone-deaf material.
But we’ve evolved, both as a society and as an audience. Specifically,
we’ve seen Sacha Baron Cohen eviscerate imbalanced international
relations in bitingly sarcastic comedies such as `Borat’ and `The
Dictator.’ By comparison, `Lost and Found’ isn’t quaint. It’s
obsolete.
O’Connell is a freelance writer.
Zero stars.
Unrated. At AMC Loews Rio 18. Contains adult language and some scenes
of violence. 100 minutes.