Review: Big City Pizza has the sauce (but, sadly, also some AI-generated imagery)

Appropriately, Big City Pizza has the sauce.

Unfortunately, it also has some (admittedly minimal) AI-generated imagery in it. I mention this right at the top because for some, it's understandably a dealbreaker. It's weird to watch a movie that is so lo-fi, handmade, and frankly, just fucking cool, and then to occasionally have these random background elements (like labels on some products) be clearly AI-generated. It's a real bummer, and such a strange ding for this movie to have against it when it's otherwise such a good time. If you want to justify it or at least wrap your head around it, there's an argument that it feed into the pastiche feel of the film's visual style. Which, sure, but I prefer my art having no AI in it whatsoever. Never ever ever.

Ok, with that out of the way, I can get on to the good stuff, of which there is a lot!

Boney is an immortal skeleton living in Big City, spending his days hanging out and watching TV and his nights working at a pizza parlor as a delivery guy. He knows tonight is going to be busy and crazy because the omniball championship game is on TV (omniball is, obviously, a sport made up of all sports, with elements of football, wrestling, gold, basketball, and more), and the city is going nuts. No one expected the Big City Beavers to make it all the way, but here they are representing. Additionally, there is a Super Blood Moon looming overhead, which promises plenty of weirdness on its own.

And weirdness, there is. As we go out on various deliveries with Boney, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there are very few (if any) normal people in this city, and none of them are ordering pizza tonight. Instead, each delivery becomes a strange little episode in and of itself, with Boney as a main character, unwitting participant, and occasional observer. At one point, he tells one of his customers "I'm weird shitted out," but there's no rest for the wicked, or for the immortal skeleton pizza delivery guy, as it were.

The film does a great job of keeping things interesting, and finding new levels for each delivery. An early delivery finds Boney walking into a dominatrix's playroom, where he's asked to force-feed her sex-prisoner. Another delivery is at a laundromat, where a Gorgon woman is having an emotional breakdown over the lipstick stains on her man's shirt collar. (There's also a crow man with a gigantic penis in the laundromat, but he's just an extra in this story.) It is a truly, and literally, colorful cast of characters, featuring a ton of creative and weird designs. A lot of the female characters kind of have AI face going on (though I don't think they were AI-generated) -- big eyes and all that -- but the rest are much more interesting. One of my favorites is Chef, who's (obviously) the chef at the pizza place, whose eyes are billiard balls. A really cool detail in a movie full of them.

The look of the film is endlessly fascinating. It really does feel like it pulls from all kinds of disciplines and inspirations, with certain elements looking like actual photos being dropped into the world (like the piles of clothes swirling in the laundry machines) while other parts are super stylized and wild-looking. It's a feast for the eyes in its way -- I loved spending time in this off-kilter world, with this bunch of weirdos. The animation tingles and pulses and twitches -- it's alive, always moving, always something interesting to look at. It reminded me a bit of Acid City, one of this year's standout animated shorts, in that this place feels so full of life and authentically lived-in.

That feeling is also helped by the film's POV. We see everything from Boney's point-of-view, and the film is constructed as a single continuous take. It is kind of mind-blowing in its scope. Just the geography of the world -- like, we end up in so many parts of town, in various houses and stores, even in a drug-induced fantasy vision (featuring one of the wildest sex scenes in cinema history -- unforgettable), and it all just flows into each other. Even a big chase scene through an inferno is woven into the single take. It is such an impressive feat of imagination, world-building, and story design.

It's even more impressive that the film never feels trapped by that design. Sometimes, a single-take movie can feel a bit oppressive. As viewers, we're used to the release of a cut, and when those edits are taken away, it doesn't always land well. Big City Pizza largely skirts this issue because of its story structure. We often end up in new places that feel like distinct episodes within the narrative, and Boney occasionally looks at his phone, which kind of gives you a de facto cut despite it still being a continuous part of his POV. Some of the on-screen phone stuff represents the movie's crudest and wildest swings, such as a commercial for cat's milk that is pure innuendo. (I'm also a big fan of Boney's text messages looking like ransom notes cut out of magazines -- a great touch.)

If you haven't already gleaned as much, this is very much an adults-only affair. The film is full of sexual innuendo, nudity, swearing, off-color jokes. It's very funny, and feels a bit nostalgic in the way it feels so at ease with its tone. A lot of this comes down to what a likable hero Boney is. He's going through a truly bizarre, chaotic night, but he has such a chill, laissez-faire attitude in the face of it all. It makes Big City Pizza feel like a hangout movie gone wrong, like some midnight movie twist on Slacker or something. It really is one of the coolest movies I've seen this year.

Which, yeah, makes the AI-ness of it all, all the more disappointing. But, when so much creativity and care otherwise went into it, I find myself not forgiving, but at least enjoying the rest of the movie for the trippy, bonkers ride that it is.