Would Charlie Sheen pay 50 bucks to watch something like this? Did he slope off stage after 90 increasingly numbing minutes of witless banter with a flailing Russell Peters and a perpetual rumble of idiotic comments from the audience, and think to himself, “Oh, that went well”? Did he fucking learn anything from this debacle? Did we? Actually, some did. There was a steadily growing number of walkouts during the penultimate show in Sheen’s My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option tour, which amounted to little more for its Vancouver stop than the actor and comedian Peters sitting there shooting the shit. It would have been nice if they’d factored an interesting conversation into the thing.

As it was, Sheen only managed to muster the Adonis DNA for a small handful of rousingly hate-filled strafing runs at various exes and execs, like when he called porn star Melanie Rios a “retarded fuckin’ troll zombie", or invited the audience to help him kill Two and Half Men boss Chuck Lorre. “I think they’re gonna debut in the fall,” he went on to predict about the show. “It’s gonna be a disaster, and then they’re gonna call me back.” Does he really think that? Notwithstanding that this was the kind of night where the statement “I didn’t shoot Kelly Preston, I didn’t hold a knife to Brooke’s throat” came off as fairly tepid, the currently sober actor just isn’t delivering the pathological coke rants like he used to. This left it to Peters to liven things up with a few zingers, such as when an audience member asked, “What happened with the hooker in the closet at that hotel?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” Peters shot back.

But the Canuck comic also let a few juicy opportunities evaporate. He definitely should have probed a little more–or even at all–when Sheen reminisced about buying Tom Cruise a hooker. Then again, perhaps Peters had second thoughts when the increasingly bird-faced brat-packer added, “I’ve never said that in public. The church of Martian idiots is gonna be all over me now.” The putative star of the show was at his most violent and torpedo-like whenever he talked about women. “Most disappointing porn star sex?” somebody asked. “By disappointing do you mean the sex, or when they stole all my shit?” Sheen asked back. His tribute to Ginger Lynn: “I saw her years later and I thought, ”˜I fucked that?’” And what about the thing with the hooker in the closet? “I didn’t even fuck her, man, and thanks to Ambien, the Devil’s Aspirin, I’m naked, fighting cops. Winning? Not.”

And so it went on, and on. Peters insisted that his new friend has been misrepresented in the media–which should go without saying, actually–but it didn’t make Sheen any more sympathetic. “I have an idea. We’ll talk, you fuckin’ listen. That’s what you paid for,” was his dark response to the growing chorus of heckles. “Go fuck yourself!” he yelled at a punter who called him an “unfunny asshole” before storming out. For a “Vatican assassin”, Sheen came off like a barely articulate blockhead. But he did at least provide the evening with its one inadvertent moment of insight. “I think if you keep failing at something, just stop,” he mused, about his three botched marriages. Dude, you’re saying this after 20 shows?

Georgia Straight, May 2011