Kac Wawa

Kac Wawa is a 2012 Polish comedy film directed by Łukasz Karwowski. It tells the story of a group of men, one of whom is getting married, and therefore the others throw a buck's party for him.

The film was universally panned by critics and failed at the box office.

Plot

Andrzej is getting married and, on the night before his wedding, he and his friends (Karol, Jarek, Tomek, and Jerzy) meet up in order to play Macao, whereas his fiancé Marta is having her bachelorette party. As she gets more and more drunk and starts wandering across Warsaw, Andrzej and the others are trying to find some prostitutes to keep them company for the rest of the night.

Cast

• Borys Szyc as Andrzej
• Michał Żurawski as Tomasz
• Mariusz Pujszo as Jerzy
• Antoni Pawlicki as Jarek
• Michał Milowicz as Karol
• Sonia Bohosiewicz as Marta
• Aleksandra Nieśpielak as Gocha
• Tomasz Karolak as Silvio
• Przemysław Bluszcz as "Kobyła"
• Mirosław Zbrojewicz as "Kaban"
• Anna Prus as Klaudia
• Roma Gąsiorowska as Sandra

Naming controversy

The film's initial negative reception came along long before the actual premiere and was brought about by the revelation of the title, which bore striking similarities to the Polish title of a recent American comedy hit Hangover, released in Poland as Kac Vegas (kac - Polish for hangover). The Karkowski film was named in a very similar fashion, replacing the word Vegas with Wawa (which is a pejorative abbreviation for Warsaw, where the film takes place). This was seen by many as a blatant attempt to take advantage of another picture's popularity and thus ensure that a lot of viewers who liked the American film would turn up to see Kac Wawa as well.

Reception

Kac Wawa proved to be a financial failure. After just seventeen days of being shown in theaters many of them removed the film from the repertoire. A worker of one of those cinemas explained: "We withdrew Kac Wawa because we couldn't sell the tickets. People would leave the cinema while the movie was being shown. After that only one or two people would turn up. We figured we couldn't afford to keep this movie in the repertoire."^[1]

The critical reception was almost exclusively negative. Virtually every single aspect of the film was criticized, including the dialogues, characters, acting, elements of comedy, and script. Tomasz Raczek, one of the best known Polish critics, wrote in his review:

"So I came to see the movie KAC WAWA and I've got to admit, I don't remember the last time I felt so embarrassed at the cinema. This isn't just a bad movie. This movie is like a disease, like a malignant tumor: it kills the faith in cinema and respect for actors."

To contribute to the film's overwhelmingly negative reputation, producer Jacek Samojłowicz shocked public opinion when he sued Tomasz Raczek for the fact that Raczek's review might have been the decisive reason for his film's failure at the box office. Samojłowicz said that "according to [his] lawyers, [Raczek] has exceeded the limits of film criticism and breached journalistic ethics, perhaps for personal reasons."^[2] As for now, the case is still under way.

The film's screenwriter Piotr Czaja confronted Tomasz Raczek and accused the latter of having failed to understand the message of Kac Wawa. Czaja also claimed that, contrary to what Raczek and a number of other critics had written, he had actually been given the impression that the viewers liked the film and laughed a lot. The two eventually did not reach an agreement.^[3]

Raczek was attacked by the film's leading star, Borys Szyc, as well. On his Facebook profile Szyc wrote: "Critics are one-legged theorists of the broad jump. It's easiest to just criticize; especially we Poles love it."^[4]

References