This horrendous faux-documentary is about as cheap and nasty as you’d expect from its title, though nowhere near as funny. Barry Lick (Williams) is a filmmaker who has been temporarily suspended from his post as a college lecturer due to his ‘unorthodox teaching methods’. Still receiving pay from the college, he takes the opportunity to make a documentary about two local businessmen who are involved in drug trafficking, prostitution and various rackets. But by associating with these criminals, he finds himself more involved in their activities than he had first anticipated.
The film starts out technically impressive the performances are convincing, and the camerawork and editing lend it a sense of authenticity. For the first ten or 15 minutes at least, it’s the kind of film that might trick you into thinking it’s a documentary if you’d just casually tuned into it on TV. Thereafter, though, it comprehensively squanders all of the credibility it has earned, as it becomes increasingly overblown, unrealistic and dull.
The fundamental problem is the subject matter, which seems a waste of such potentially talented filmmakers. For example, there’s a painfully long scene consisting of a tedious argument between an obnoxious cameraman and a smackhead. Why should we care about these people and the outcome of their petty argument? We’re never given an incentive, and that’s true throughout the film.
Another issue is the uneven tone, which flits artlessly between absurd comedy and sleazy drama. In one of the more farcical sequences, the film crew become involved in burying a dead junkie; following this, the film sinks into muckier territory, involving porn shoots and, at its absolute nadir, gang rape. It’s thoroughly unpleasant and, crucially, artistically unjustified material: the film wallows in seediness without saying anything about it, which means that rather than intelligently handling these inflammatory subjects, it basically plays them for debauched entertainment.
The idea of a fictional film crew intending to document the life of a criminal but then becoming involved in the criminal’s activities themselves has already been explored by Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel in their 1992 film Man Bites Dog. Indeed, the makers of Diary of a Bad Lad show their awareness of this similarity: the onscreen crew say that their intention is to make a film that’s like ‘Nick Broomfield meets Man Bites Dog’. The problem is that Man Bites Dog has already been made. Diary of a Bad Lad pinches some of the narrative ideas of that film whilst completely ignoring its point and failing to add anything new to its provocative comments. What’s left, then, is redundant; a tedious affair of virtually no artistic merit.
Overall Verdict: Grim, unfunny, derivative and dumb.
Special Features:
Scene selection
Extended Intro
Teaser Footage
Reviewer: Tom René