To be the best you must learn from the best. But what if the best one turns out to be just a fictitious idea of what it was meant to show you so that your comfort wouldn’t be altered? What if learning from the best turns out to be the worst and the best is just a usurper? Writer’s Block has a boring answer for that.

Skip Larson (Craig Nigh) is a one-hit-wonder writer trying to get his next hit but keeps failing with every try. After almost losing his hope for losing more important things in his life, he receives the chance of his life: an invitation to collaborate with a famous writer in co-writing the next “best” novel. Once Skip starts living with Chester Everett McGraw (Mike Gassaway), the famous writer, he starts realizing that his mentor is mostly a jerk with writer’s block and is trying to push him to do most of the work. Skip begins to feel anxious after several months, and Chester thinks time is running up for both of them. What can you do to accelerate the delivery of chilling lines and a killer plot? You start acting weird…

Writer’s Block is 50 minutes of slow-burning buildup with a few flashbacks that lead to nothing, 15 minutes of in-your-face interesting clues that also lead to nothing, and 25 minutes of disappointing thrills that lead to an abysm of nothingness. It’s a gloomy and doleful mix of Misery and The Most Dangerous Game that, on the whole it sounds wonderful, but on paper it looks questionable.

The main problem with the story is that you can tell that it has been written by two different persons who were not in contact or shared their ideas. Each scene contradicts the previous one and causes the thread to be completely lost and lets the editing to be seen as a sequence of badly glued patches— like bandages on a broken arm without a cast.

I find it unnecessary to mention the performance of the cast because it seems that they were never informed of the motives of their characters until they recorded the last scene of each one. The characters, although they seem to evolve throughout the plot, have no essence. Had the profile of the main character been developed, a frustrated and tormented writer from the past, we could’ve had a better plot than the nonexistent one. The series of nefarious dialogues that attempted to resemble those produced by Tarantino, but with the absence of his clever and ironic touch, could have been omitted to indulge us into holding likeable characters with actual motives— each character is emptier than the bottles of whiskey drained by Skip.

Writer’s Block isn’t a novel idea. It tries to represent itself as a best-selling hardcover but it has the contents of a gas station discount paperback book. It stands by the idea of judging books by their covers but I must warn you to not be fooled by it.

2 OUT OF 10 JAVELINS