Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs. The Reverend’ On Netflix, An Interactive Movie That’s As Surreal As The Series Was

If there was any show that would do well in Netflix’s still-developing interactive format, it’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy’s world is so surreal and crazy that putting pretty much any choice in front of a viewer will yield something that makes sense as far as Kimmy’s world is concerned. After all, this is a woman who talks to her backpack and says things like “tooken” a lot. So, what did the comedic minds of Tina Fey, Robert Carlock and their writers come up with when tasked with making an interactive movie?

UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT: KIMMY VS. THE REVEREND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT

The Gist: It’s a happy time for Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper), five years after she and a bunch of other women who came under the spell of Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm) were rescued from an underground bunker in Indiana, not knowing the ways of the outside world. She’s about to get married to Prince Frederick (Daniel Radcliffe) in a few days and she’s dress shopping with her former landlord, Lillian Kaushtupper (Carol Kane), her former boss, Jacqueline White (Jane Krakowski) and best friend, Titus Andromedon (Titus Burgess). She wonders if she should pick the fun dress or the more traditional “boring” dress.

Then a prompt comes up for the audience to choose. That’s the first of many choices Tina Fey and Robert Carlock asks the audience to make in their new Unbreakble Kimmy Schmidt interactive movie. On the way back to the home she shares with Frederick, she discovers a “choose your own adventure”-type book in her backpack, Jan S. Port (Stephanie D’Abruzzo), and has no idea how it got there. But first, she and Frederick, a sheltered royal type who has a closer relationship with his nanny than his parents, decide whether they want to wedding plan, read the book, or snog.

She tries to find out with her fellow bunker mates whose book it might be. Cyndee Pokorny (Sara Chase), who has been taking therapy to blank that time out of her mind, is coming in for the wedding and the Reverend’s name brings it all back. As Kimmy looks through the book, she wonders whose it is, considering she’s never gone to Louis Gossett, Jr. Junior High, from where the book was checked out after she was put in the bunker.

Kimmy decides to visit the Reverend in prison and find out. He tries to be secretive about it but he blurts out that there’s another set of girls somewhere in West Virginia. She has to decide between going with Titus or Jacqueline — of course, that decision is left up to you, and you get the appropriate response if you pick Jacqueline. If you pick Titus, Jacqueline has to hold down the fort on the set of the action movie he’s about to start filming (she is his agent, after all).

In West Virginia, Titus and Kimmy run into a number of characters, including a gas station attendant (Johnny Knoxville) who’s an inattentive parent, a middle-aged stoned dude (Chris Parnell) putting on his own Fyre festival, and more. Titus also tries to pacify an unfriendly bar crowd with his rendition of “Freebird.” That leads them to find out that the Reverend has escaped! What will Kimmy find when she catches up with him?

In the B-plot, Lillian attempts to make Frederick into a man, but at his bachelor party (at a North Korean-style karaoke bar), he kisses Lillian, mainly because she reminds him so much of his nanny (also played by Kane). Of course, we then have to make a decision on whether Lillian or the nanny tries to give him “experience.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, but funnier and more surreal.

Performance Worth Watching: We’ve appreciated Daniel Radcliffe’s comedic turn over the past few years, and he’s one of the funnier parts of this movie. Despite being a prince, Frederick is so sheltered that he might be even more naive than Kimmy is, and that’s saying a lot. But they’re the perfect match for each other, and we hope to see the two of them together if there’s another Kimmy Schmidt movie in the near future.

Memorable Dialogue: Kimmy Schmidt‘s dialogue and jokes zoom past you so fast that it’s hard to keep track of everything. We did like when Cyndee called Lillian “Kimmy’s mom, I think.” Also, when Kimmy finds the Reverend in the woods and confronts him after he trips and hurts himself while on the run, he tries to distract her by going, “Look! Billy Joel!” Kimmy also tells Titus that “When lambs are killed they make a human scream and then a rattling sound,” one of the many dark things that’s rattling around in Kimmy’s brain.

Sex and Skin: Besides Kimmy and Frederick’s very awkward make-out session, there’s nothing.

Our Take: It seems paradoxical to say that Kimmy Vs. The Reverend’s pathways are complex while at the same time saying that there are too many dead ends, but that’s what we’re presented with here. That first choice, between the fun dress and the fancy dress, influences scenes later on, especially at the end of the movie, and other choices pay off both immediately and later on, as well.

But there are also a lot of instances where you’re sent to a dead end and one of the characters steps in, breaks the 4th wall, and sends you back to the previous choice. Once or twice, you’re given the chance to make the same choice again and get a different scene to reward your patience. And there are pathways that take some effort to get through, and others that may show up on one viewing but not another, even with the same choices. For instance, there’s a path where Titus and Kimmy go back to the gas station and see a different baby than the first time, but we didn’t find that during our first view, and had no idea which choice led to that the second and third time we watched.

No matter where you go, though, it seems that when you get to the conclusion, it ends up being the same no matter what. What changes is the scene after the conclusion, when Kimmy actually married Frederick, and the credits roll. It’s there where you’ll notice things like Bowen Yang playing Kim Jong-un, Amy Sedaris playing Mimi Kanassis, Fred Armisen as Robert Durst (!) and Josh Groban playing himself and wonder what you need to do to see them. We manged to get to everyone but Kim Jong-un, and we want to go back to find him.

Fey (who appears for a split second as we rewind from one bad choice), Carlock and director Claire Scanlon do add some fun things to the format, like what happens if you click “Skip Intro” during the show’s very catchy theme song, which stars “viral star” Walter Bankston (Mike Britt). And the story is fairly coherent from beginning to end, even if you make some choices that mean you don’t get to the “winning” solution. But as with the series it came from, we just wish some of the jokes whizzing by our heads were a wee bit funnier instead of just thrown out there to see what lands.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs. The Reverened is a lot of fun and doesn’t wear you down when you decide to watch again and make new choices. Kemper is in peak Kimmy form in this movie. We just wish it were a little funnier.

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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs. The Reverend On Netflix