MYSTERY TEAM is the future of cinema (kinda)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, INCEPTION is mind-blowing. AVATAR will keep us fucking around with 3D for the next decade or so. But when we're talking about the future of cinema, any serious discussion will have to include MYSTERY TEAM.

The brainchild of Derrick Comedy, an online comedy troupe who have brought us such viral classics as Girls Are Not To Be Trusted, Bro Rape, and this hilariously crass send-up of the National Spelling Bee, MYSTERY TEAM is a charming film with no budget and a ton of very, very funny ideas. The basic hook is a team of kid detectives have grown up without ever leaving the whole kid detective-thing behind. They don't swear. They charge a dime for a case. But when a murder case falls in their lap, the kids have to solve the case, get the girl, and maybe grow up a little bit.

If I were Peter Travers, I would paraphrase the EPK synopsis like I just did, and then say things like "MYSTERY TEAM is fall-down funny!" and "deliciously warped!", but I'm not trying to get on a box, so fuck that guy.

But MYSTERY TEAM is truly fall-down funny, and marks the emergence of a true talent with Donald Glover. This kid is blowing up - he's written, starred in, or scored three of the funniest network shows in recent memory, he's self-producing and releasing killer hip-hop albums ("I can Say Anything, call me John Cusack / keep my dick wetter than the bottom of a cruise ship"), and he recently launched a Spider-Man petition that cleverly got people talking about the role of race in comic books - not bad for a guy who probably has to put up with every third person he meets asking him for PREDATOR 2 merch.

But here, Glover is just part of a devastating ensemble that completely gets the material (probably because most of them helped write it). The film is playing with the conventions of all those Encyclopedia Brown-Hardy Boys-Nancy Drew novels of our childhood, and combining them with coke dealers, strip clubs, and horrifying diarrhea jokes. The result is something that's, well, deliciously warped, that feels almost infinitely re-watchable.

The real drawbacks of the film are with it's obvious budget (or lack thereof), which occasionally gives the film a cheap feel. Which brings me back to that whole "future of cinema" thing. In a world where the Old Spice guy is getting an NBC show and The Whitest Kids U Know are on basic cable, we've all become casting directors, with the web as our version of headshots, and YouTube as our generation's casting couch.

And we've done a hell of a job with MYSTERY TEAM. Now we just need to get them some money.