“CHILI FINGER”

“Some of the events depicted in this film actually happened,” reads the onscreen text at the beginning of Edd Benda and Stephen Helstad’s “Chili Finger.” “The rest did not.” Obviously, the inciting incident actually happened: A woman, here named Jessica Lipki (Judy Greer), finds a finger in her chili at fast food chain Blake Junior’s. A struggling divorce attorney in Wisconsin whose daughter just left for college in Pennsylvania, Jessica realizes what this situation could mean for her family and takes the opportunity to get a cash settlement from the corporation. After that setup, all bets are off for fidelity to the ripped-from-the-tabloids story that inspired the film. With a wacky cast of beloved character actors playing over-the-top caricatures, the film descends into a Coen Brothers-aping chucklefest that revels in such strong human idiocy that there’s no way the rest of this could have actually happened, but who cares when it’s this funny?

In the film’s fantastic opening sequence, Benda and Helstad strongly establish the tone for the rest of the film. A beer bottling factory worker drops his vape in the machinery and races along the line to retrieve it. In a fantastic bit of misdirection, he rescues it without injury, only to go back for something else that he sees drop into one of the bottles. Before either he or the audience realizes what’s happening, there goes his finger! Backed by a blissfully odd yodeling-based score, the sequence lets you know exactly what you’re in for with the rest of the film: A well-edited, slightly offbeat, wacky comedy sprinkled with some cartoon violence. As the film goes on, it gets more and more over-the-top and farther away from the humanity at its center, becoming a live-action cartoon that entertains, but also feels a bit empty.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but Greer and Sean Astin, as her husband, bring such a wonderfully messy, nuanced humanity to their performances that they make the film around them feel a bit clunky and labored. Greer, in particular, couldn’t be a better fit for the material. Her comic timing has always been razor-sharp, but the bone-deep weariness she brings to Jessica helps ground her in the middle of all the comic hijinks. Jessica is tired of dealing with her idiotic clients (“I’ve been driving since I was twelve, and we drank then, too,” says an elderly client facing a driver’s license suspension over a DUI charge) and resents that they don’t have the money to take their daughter to college and visit for parents’ weekend. She feels adrift and wants to take control of her life, so she’s ready to use her legal know-how to shake down Blake Junior’s for a bit of money that will relieve some of her unhappiness. However, when corporate representative Blake Junior II (Madeline Wise) places a condition on the $10,000 settlement, making them sign documents agreeing to never eat at a Blake Junior’s again, Jessica’s husband bristles. He’s eaten there for years and has a men’s group that meets there regularly. In a fit of pique, he manages to get the settlement upped to $100,000, but still wants to eat at Blake Junior’s. Astin’s stalwart forthrightness makes him a strong moral center for the film, and his good-natured simplicity makes him endearing. He’s the one unambiguously good person in the film, and his comic fixation on being able to eat at this one chain restaurant is both endearing and very funny.

Both Greer and Astin have strong dramatic material to work with in addition to the comedy, and they play it with as much subtlety as they can within the broad strokes of Benda and Helstad’s preferred style. Unfortunately, the rest of the ensemble has no such material, although they’re all committed to the film’s wacky tone that it’s hard to find fault with their performances. John Goodman has the most to work with as the CEO of Blake Junior’s, and his facial expressions are a hilarious reminder of why he’s one of our finest character actors. While he initially tells his daughter she did the right thing by paying off the Lipkis, he takes the finger in the chili personally, sending his best friend, Vietnam vet Bryan Cranston, to investigate further. Cranston, sporting a fantastic set of mutton chops, is obviously having a blast amusing himself, but the tonal shift in his performance for a dramatic scene late in the film feels out of place. The same can be said of Paul Stanko as the man whose finger ends up in the chili, initially presented as a comic bumbler before taking a deeply serious turn in the film’s last act.

When all these capital-C Characters are in comedic mode, “Chili Finger” can be a lot of fun to watch. Helstad’s screenplay contains plenty of hilarious lines of dialogue, which the cast members tear into with abandon. The over-the-top tone works in spurts, but over 100 minutes, it can grow exhausting, especially as the plot spirals out of control in the film’s third act. If you enjoy that sort of thing, “Chili Finger” will tickle your funny bone well enough. If you don’t, though, it will come across as grating. Either way, though, it’s worth a watch just for Judy Greer’s fantastic performance.