I was so excited to see this film, as it's the sequel to one of my favorite films of all time, Henry Fool, a unique, darkly comedic and touching masterpiece.  I'll start by detailing what made Henry Fool such a great movie and how Hal Hartley failed to repeat these elements in Fay Grim, even with the aid of the original cast.  In Henry Fool the plot didn't drive the action and carry the weight of the movie by itself, Henry Fool was overloaded with interesting and quirky dysfunctional characters.    From Simon, Grim a garbage man who everyone thinks is retarded to the eccentric, to Henry Fool the alcoholic writer named who expounds upon the value of his self-proclaimed writing ability, the under appreciation of Milton's works, in-between living in the Grim family basement.

In Henry Fool, these characters and there interactions is what makes the movie so genius.  Lots of witty dialogue, dark jokes, and even some well paced drama around a heart felt underdog story made Henry Fool a beautiful film, but a dark comedy that is also heart warming.  I originally saw the film in a creative writing class where we were studying building characters through action. Fay Grim has most of the same characters, even played by the same actors, Simon, Fay, Henry, Angus, the priest, but they are no longer fun to watch.  That's because instead of developing them through their dysfunctional interactions and having the plot be pushed by the characters, Hal Hartley forces a crazy and not very fun conspiracy theory driven plot involving terrorism, secret codes, a bin laden look alike and the CIA.

Fay Grim starts for the first few minutes and you think it's going to be the beginning of a new Henry Fool style adventure through a dysfunctional world of quirky characters, but then the whole movie immediately gets thrown into a ridiculous conspiracy spoof action film.  Literally half the movie is Fay running around getting shot at and talking with different conspirators.  The action is unbelievable, but more importantly not very fun to watch.  It's like an action movie, where they cut out all the cool effects and you're left with unbelievable twists and turns followed up by people speaking in hotel rooms and hurrying to catch their flight.  I kept wanting to watch the cool characters interacting, but instead Hal had them parroting back stories involving Israel, Afghanistan, Iran (insert country here). 

He keeps putting in more and more detail into the world wide conspiracy plot that he constructs an unsolvable puzzle of lunacy. To be honest I didn't really understand the entire point with the Islamic terrorists that were harboring Henry Fool.  There is a Bin Laden look a like that supposedly had been helped by the US.  Now I know Hal Hartley is trying to make some type of point on world wide terrorism, but in a comedic movie, that is the sequel to Henry Fool, it just doesn't work.  It's not funny, It's not serious, it's nothing but ridiculous.  It didn't seem to mean much of anything to my viewing. Now at this point they'll probably be some little film analyst will interject something along the lines of "well this related to this and symbolized this and you can see this quote...." Guess what, if you need all that subtlety for the movie to be enjoyable: it sucks and the meaning doesn't matter. 

It's sad to see a sequel created 10 years later by the original write/director and have it be so terrible.  I mean he had 10 years to work on it or at least to think about and tease the idea.  On a positive note, the technicality of the filmmaking itself (angels, transitions, style) is top notch.  This film also has some surprisingly sexy scenes were nothing happens at all,  At one point in particular I really wanted to watch Fay make out with one of the females spys, and I'm sure that was exactly how I was suppose to feel. Another positive thing about the film was that it was shot with dutch angles.  Every shot was taken with a tilted camera, which was fun to see how it would play out through the scenes. If you liked Henry Fool, I would consider watching this, but note it's not even 1/10 the movie and it makes the characters less enjoyable.  If you haven't seen Henry Fool - WATCH IT BEFORE FAY GRIM.  It's excellent and has received almost universal acclaim.