DON'T TELL LARRY - Mark Reviews Movies

Don't Tell Larry, Level 33 Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

The eponymous character of Don't Tell Larry is more than just the office weirdo, or maybe, that's only what co-writer/co-directors Greg Porper and John Schimke want us to believe. To be sure, Larry (Kiel Kennedy) isn't the kind of guy with whom you want to spend too much time, lest he reveal something deeply uncomfortable about himself or suggest that he pushed someone out of an office window.

That's the setup of this appropriately strange but unfortunately confused movie. Larry's the new guy at work, introduced to Susan (Patty Guggenheim), a nine-time winner of employee of the year during her nine-year employment at a Midwestern cruise company, by CEO Bruce (Ed Begley Jr.). Bruce has told Susan that she's in line to take over the company when he retires in just a matter of days, but Larry's arrival seems to put a wrench in that plan. For whatever reason, Bruce likes the guy and wants to make sure he's comfortable at his new job.

What is there to be said about Larry that could possibly give one a sense of this deeply odd and intangibly unsettling man? Let's start, perhaps, with his love of raisins. That might not seem like much of a defining quality, but Larry has a very particular way of eating those dried snacks. He likes to stab them with a pencil and eat them directly from the pointed tip. In one scene that follows his long drive home, Larry has even made up a little song about raisins, which amounts to maybe three or four lines that he repeats for the entirety of the commute.

We don't know whether to laugh at the guy, because Kennedy is genuinely funny in the role, or to want to find some way to escape his presence, because the actor is also quietly frightening as the character. Porper and Schimke, along with their star, have invented quite the unique creation in Larry, a man who's either a joke or a threat, and the tension of that uncertainty isn't just the problem for Susan and co-worker Patrick (Kenneth Mosley). It's a significant reason this movie is genuinely funny and legitimately disturbing in its early stages.

With the character and the central question surrounding him in place, though, the movie eventually has to do something with him and answer who he is, what he has done, and what he's capable of doing. The character might be too effective as an oddity, however, because the movie loses its way as we stop wondering if he has killed someone, as well as if he's willing to do it again, and just wish he'd go away so that we don't have to deal with him—murderer or not.

The starting point for this mystery is Susan's decision not to invite Larrry to a surprise retirement party for Bruce, which is happening afterhours on the new hire's first day. The next morning, Bruce asks why Larry wasn't there, which ultimately leads him to reveal that the weird guy is his illegitimate son and that he plans to make him the new CEO. Understandably outraged, Susan lashes out and throws a rock at the window.

She's fired, of course, but the real problems emerge when Larry asks why he wasn't invited. Susan lies that it was Bruce's idea, and after saying that the boss will pay, Bruce ends up dead in the parking lot after falling or being pushed from his office.

To call the rest of the plot convoluted would be an understatement. That's part of the movie's odd comedic charm, if a movie about possible murder, an absolute weirdo, and elaborate schemes to discover the truth—involving urine samples, burglary, and a fur hat that may have been made from a cat—can even be suggested to be charming in the first place. Every step Susan and Patrick take to avoid Larry or find out the truth about him inevitably backfires, leading them into increasingly uncomfortable, embarrassing, belittling, or incriminating situations.

The sense of escalation is the material's strong point at first, such as during a sequence in which the two try to frame Larry for smoking pot in the office. Instead, the company decides to institute an office-wide drug test. Since Susan and Patrick indulged the previous night unintentionally and to blow off steam, they now have to come up with a plan to get clean urine or swap their samples with that of Larry, who has a habit of showing up uninvited, unannounced, and unwanted at the worst possible time.

That idea continues throughout the movie, resulting in more outlandish scenarios and even tighter spots for Susan and Patrick (A police detective, played by Dot-Marie Jones, starts looking into Bruce's death, too, suggesting that whoever cracked the window would be just as responsible as anyone who might have pushed him out it). It's funny, basically, until our bumbling duo stop seeming in over their heads and just seem to be behaving in a way to keep the gags coming and going. Then, there's the issue the title character of Don't Tell Larry, who simply becomes too much, well, whoever and whatever he is. That's the point, obviously, but maybe, the filmmakers make it too well. A little Larry goes a long, long way, and there's a lot of the guy here.

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