It's looking great, I'm always really excited to see the progress of this shot (and that ending cracks me up every time!).
The eye direction stuff doesn't bother me at the moment, but eye darts will change once you get into spline mode. Eye darts can be very subtle, so it's more something to look at once everything is more in the polish phase. But even now, it's already looking good. If the iris-pulling you're referring to is the moment like on x252 and 275, I don't mind. It's as if he's cross eyed and adds to his character. Those poses could be worse, where you actually loose the eye. You're just cutting into the black area a little bit.
The rest is working great, I like the pacing, the holds and slow movements. The only area that's too slow is your jump of the "dumb" guy. The jump up feels okay, but the hang time is really long and the drop is too slow. That part should be a lot faster, which will also add nice contrast to the slow build up. Then you calm down and then the very end where they both scream is the last contrast spike again, which will work really well.
Stepped mode is treacherous though, I so I highly recommend you switch back and forth between stepped and spline, so that you can see how the timing is changing.
For instance, when the other guy goes "It's me stupid", the screen left arm of his stays put after the push, so things like that will need settle and keep alive and either you put way more keys down in your stepped mode, or you attack that during spline mode.
Other areas to think about are x21 to 22. That's a big move over one frame, so that you will have slow down by a few frames once you get out of stepped mode.
Same with the "cool" guy's take from x105 to 106. Big move over one frame.
Hope that makes sense. :)
JD
