If you want to do a quick offhand comedy about a couple of guys competing in a frantic, slapstick cartoon style, you’d make a TikTok. If it got a smile, fine. If not, no harm done, scroll on.
Back in the last century, to create such a work, you’d have make a short film, which Andrew Simonian did in a modest 1997 work called “The Take Out Move.” Now, after a career in television, developing shows like “The Singing Bee,” Surgery Saved My Life” and “Separation Anxiety,” (not to mention writing the parody “Bi-Curious George”), Simonian has returned to his early film as if it were a buried classic that needed the amplification of becoming a full length feature.
This result, also titled “The Take Out Move,” is similarly plotted as thinly as a “Tom & Jerry” short: Two guys, Whalen (Jeremy Sless) and Davis (Nick Grace), are assigned to get a date with the same girl, Amber (Alexandra Miles).
Whalen follows her all over Los Angeles and surrounding cities, according to a exhaustive montage, before she suddenly opens a door that knocks him out cold.
Amber is nursing him at home when Davis shows up and the two dudes begin battling in some badly choreographed fights that, we learn later, are shot-by-shot reproductions of the the original short.
“This is getting ridiculous,” one of them says, and he’s not wrong.