A beaver, yesterday

It’s been a whopping 13 years since Jim Carrey brought us all to tears in Liar Liar. And a scarcely believable 17 since Robin Williams did the same in Mrs Doubtfire. So we salute you, Mel Gibson, for stepping forward to fill the inadequate-Dad-on-inevitable path-to-rehabilitation-and-reconciliation-movie shaped hole in all our lives with your new film, The Beaver.

Yes, The Beaver, in which an alcoholic loser (Gibson – I’m saying nothing) begins a tentative, and ultimately transformative friendship with a discarded toy beaver, which he wears on his hand. The beaver (voiced by Gibson, in a particularly poor attempt at ventriloquism) sounds like Ray Winstone playing an Australian playing a Cockney.

The whole twisted enterprise looks like a deranged cross between the Mitch Connor episode of South Park, when Cartman’s hand becomes Jennifer Lopez, and the sequence in William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ when a man takes his talented asshole on tour with him as a double act, only for his asshole to get too big for its boots and take over.

The newly-released trailer is below (be warned, your mind will be blown. Blown to the extent that it may never work again in the same way). This gets 10-out-of-10 on the WTF? scale.