I worry I may be about to forfeit any credibility I had as a critic. You’re only allowed to like some things ‘ironically’ in this game, or you’ll be painted as a fool. But hey, IFL isn’t just about reinforcing the norms of traditional Hollywood output, so, let’s talk about why Killer Bean Forever is an unironically good piece of independent animation.
In a previous piece I wrote about the sneering of critics around objectively silly stories, I noted that at some stage, you need to take a look at yourself and honestly ask: If I need to prove I am smarter than Howard the Duck, what does that say about me? Sometimes, a ridiculous premise can be fun – something to watch to laugh with and/or at – without having to be qualified as an ‘unmitigated disaster’.
Increasingly, this is also something that need to be applied to the apparently endless ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ industrial complex, relentlessly chugging around the internet in search of content to enjoy ironically. Often, the films which make it onto these shows aren’t even particularly bad. They just aren’t conventional Hollywood popcorn fodder. Low-budget productions, which acknowledge their limitations, and found creative, endearingly scrappy ways around them to deliver their story.
That brings me to Killer Bean Forever: a well-animated action film, in which a member of a global network of assassins learns that he is being set up, and enters the fight of his life. Along the way, there are clever nods to genre conventions, sly satirical jibes at some of its clichés, tightly choreographed fight sequences, and even a strangely absorbing dance sequence… It’s just that for no discernible reason, this is all set in a universe populated exclusively by sentient cartoon beans.
For this crime – in the only review to date recognised by Wikipedia – student journalist Scott McDanel damned the film with faint praise. He ventured that it should be “highly recommended… as an “it’s-so-bad-it’s-good” flick” – while also branding it “an absolute dumpster fire” in the same sentence. But most of his reasoning for why it should be regarded in these terms are the previously-mentioned points around the snobbery of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ phenomenon. Most of its proponents aren’t laughing at poor filmmaking, because they don’t understand how to make films themselves. They’re laughing at productions because they lack the Hollywood gloss that a larger budget could help disguise. So, sure, the film’s voice cast is a little ropey. The score isn’t particularly inspiring. The backgrounds are bland. And all the beans have a seam running down the back of their body – but some do not wear pants, making it seem as though their butt-crack is permanently on show.
But beyond that, allow me to set the record straight: it might not be Citizen Kane, but Killer Bean Forever is not bad.
It is an utterly bizarre set of cinematic choices which I do not fully understand. But do I think that someone could make a better movie about a hitman who also happens to be a talking grain of roasted Arabica? No. Not with all the money in the studio system. In fact, if there were enough drugs on hand to convince an exec to back a more lavish production, that trade-off would have resulted in something far more vanilla than what we got from Jeff Lew’s one-man band of a production.
Lew taught himself to animate CG images on an original bean-based project in the early 1990s. He took those skills to the bank, working as an animator on blockbusters including X-Men and The Matrix Reloaded. Perhaps that’s why he felt the need to lovingly craft a whole feature around the unassuming legumes a decade later – a sense of loyalty, of needing to give back to the original characters who helped him build his career. Or, perhaps, maybe he just really likes beans.
Whatever the reason, this career trajectory presented Lew with a unique set of skills that enabled him to successfully staff the entire project essentially by himself. As well as writing and directing, he is credited as the ‘animation department’ on IMDb (something his Matrix experience probably helped with – as he was able to expedite some scenes with “inexpensive 2D motion-capture system”), but also as sound designer, cinematographer and editor; while he shared responsibilities for concept art with Von C. Caberte, and music with Justin R. Durban. Lew also voiced at least nine of the characters in the film – casting the rest via an audition session advertised on Craigslist.
Coming back to the lofty expectations of the McDanel review (I really don’t mean to single him out, but this review is broadly treated as the only authoritative take on a film which has no critic’s score at all on Rotten Tomatoes), this is where some of the so-bad-it’s-good view comes across as especially condescending. Arguing that “the movie is a great example of sometimes your dreams being too ambitious”, he also scoffs that Lew “[hired] his voice actors and concept artist off Craigslist (I’m not kidding)”. But I struggle to think of an example in the film where Lew really seems to have been out of his depth here.
The voice-acting is not always especially well-delivered – and Vegas E. Trip struggles to add much definition to the lead role in particular – but considering this is an action film about sentient beans, it also falls in a grey area where it could justifiably be argued that it’s just making fun of its chosen genre. How many Keanu Reeves performances add definition to a character fronting a major action flick? He has some fun as Constantine, but his most celebrated roles of Neo or John Wick are utterly wooden. Perhaps Trip was just channelling that? Similarly, as Detective Cromwell (investigating Killer Bean’s case), Bryan Cromwell has a ponderous, lisping tone that doesn’t exactly zip around comedically, but is still firmly routed in the noir characters he is arguably sending up. Meanwhile, Matthew Tyler’s ‘Italian’ accent for villain Cappuccino is essentially a Tony Montana impression – the inspiration for it being itself an Italian-American actor presenting himself as a ‘Cuban’ cocaine magnate. In a vacuum, it’s a completely off-kilter choice – and possibly slightly offensive – but taken as part of a film that clearly doesn’t take itself or the films it pays homage to that seriously, it works. It’s also worth noting that Lew plays with several chewed-up Asian stereotypes common in US blockbusters. Characters which he voices include Jet Bean and a caricature of a restaurant owner, both of whom are used to flag up racist tendencies within society, the police, and within the film industry. Lew, who is of Asian heritage, wrote the script and delivered the lines that in a different context, would still be gravely offensive – but again I think this again feeds into my argument that some of the things critics might take at face value as just being bad are actually supposed to point to shortcomings that we simply take as ‘normal’ in Hollywood, or in the action genre.
This is backed up by moments in the script, and animation, when Lew manages to genuinely catch you off-guard with a perfect punchline. One moment sees Killer Bean exit a toilet stall; an image which might leave the mind wandering regarding the logistics of such an escapade, but instead yields one of the best comedic “I don’t give a fuck” lines of anti-hero dialogue I have ever heard. At the same time, every character who is gunned down or knocked unconscious immediately rag-dolls in a way which is utterly hilarious – reminiscent of the ‘deliberately flawed’ physics of video games like Goat Simulator, but also parodying the unbelievable-yet-accepted way henchmen in Steven Seagal-type films immediately fall limp and silent, the moment they receive a gut-shot.
In these cases, guffawing “I’m not kidding” at the idea these actors came from a Craigslist doesn’t feel like the gotcha the author felt it was. Certainly, doing all this yourself comes with limitations – but they are limitations a savvy filmmaker can lean into and adapt around. The results are at worst passable, and at best deliriously funny. At the same time, even beyond this, it is worth defending the film aesthetically. This was made essentially by one man, and completed in 2008.
I’ve been following the independent animation scene for my whole life – often by coincidence rather than choice – and let me tell you, a lot of it is not pretty. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen anthropomorphic goats in skin-tight bodysuits urinate on Sean Connery’s upholstery in Sir Billi. I’ve seen grotesquely mutated imps grind their way through Dwegons and Leprechauns. There are thousands of hastily computer-generated Pixar-rip-offs which have flooded the market since Toy Story. Many have been completed with more advanced software in the years since 2008, they usually cost millions of dollars more to produce than Killer Bean Forever, and yet they are universally worse. Bafflingly scripted. ‘Acted’ by celebrities who very clearly don’t want to be there. Nightmarish on the eye.
All of this makes it a little depressing that Killer Bean Forever hasn’t received a little more unironic love. It only received a limited release in the United States, Russia, Australia and Italy, the box office figures for which are ominously unavailable. At the time, it does not seem that a single professional review was committed to assessing it – and considering ‘prestigious’ publications like The Guardian can still make time to review films by Blake Ridder, that is a pretty drastic snub.
I’m happy to report that is not where the story ends, though. The cliffhanger ending for Killer Bean’s tale might have occurred more than 16 years ago, but the film received a second lease of life when Lew released a 4k rendering of Killer Bean Forever onto YouTube in 2018. With more than 65 million views in the years since, the movie has a cult status that goes far beyond the memeification of its opening dance number. Rotten Tomatoes may not have a critic score for Lew’s opus, but it does have an audience score of 96%, along with a Google rating of 4.9. These numbers are skewed by a large number of really-poorly-written reviews from ironic watchers (or in quite a few cases, people who clearly haven’t watched at all), that has not hurt the project. After all, what does it say about the intellect of someone who has to prove they are smarter than a talking bean?
At the same time, there are also fresh takes from online critics championing the film for the sake of independent filmmaking, and love of the action genre. All of this notoriety has ultimately helped to push the Killer Bean universe back into the spotlight. Amid all this, Lew is allegedly on the brink of releasing a video game as a sequel. The teaser footage looks like the characteristic blend of silly fun and ecstatic action that his previous work has primed me to expect. Not so-bad-it’s-good. Just good.
