BEFORE: I'm afraid that's it for JGL - but when I include the voice-over he did in "Knives Out", he's had four appearances this year, so he's going to make my year-end countdown. Instead, Isla Fisher carries over from "The Lookout" for HER fourth appearance this year, so I'll name-check her at the end of 2020, too. And in some ways that end of the year cannot come fast enough. I've only got 93 more movies to watch, but there are 165 days left in the year, so I'm looking at some downtime and I'll have to come up with something to fill it, somehow.
Today's film is one that I've avoided for a very long time, because it just didn't look that funny - I've never been a big Andy Samberg fan, not when he was on "SNL" and not post-SNL, either. But my feelings have to be put on hold sometimes when there's a movie that looks like the only way to connect one grouping of films to another. Right now this is the only way to get to tomorrow's film, which was re-scheduled from May's line-up, and tomorrow's film is one of the few ways to link to the big Summer Music Concert (and Documentary) series. So I go in believing that this film is just going to serve as mortar between the bricks, and that's a very hard perception to overcome. Still, it could be possible.
Some good news, though - I figured out an alternate connection between the end of my Halloween chain and a set of films that should lead to a Christmas movie, possibly two, in the event that the pandemic persists and theaters don't open on time, and "Black Widow" gets pushed back. If this happens then I'll move "Hellboy" up to the start of the October horror chain, instead of at the end, and I can now link from a different Scarlett Johansson film to a potential November/December short schedule. There are still some variables, of course, so I can't get an accurate count just yet, but I'm confident that I can work with however many slots are left after October to finish the year with an unbroken chain. So now I just have to wait and see if theaters open up again, but I'm also prepared if they don't re-open until 2021, just in case.
THE PLOT: Self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble is preparing for the jump of his life - to clear fifteen buses to raise money for his abusive stepfather Frank's life-saving heart operation.
AFTER: Well, it seems I was right about this film in the first place, which confirmed I was on the right track in avoiding it for so long. I didn't have one of those "Huh, this film wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be!" revelations, this was more or less as bad as I thought it would be. It's just not FUNNY, which should always be the first judging criteria for a so-called comedy. It's like they took that 30-second shot from "Napoleon Dynamite" where Pedro tries to do a "sweet jump" stunt for Napoleon, by taking his bike up a very small ramp, then Napoleon mistakenly saying he got like "three feet of air", when he obviously did not, expanded out to an entire movie. There's barely enough story here for a 5-minute SNL sketch, and what there is gets repeated over and over again, for non-hilarious effect.
Basically the repeating story is this: delusional man-child "Rod" tries a stunt, screws it up, goes home, interacts with his brother, has a physical fight with his step-father, vows to beat his stepfather one day, thus gaining his respect, then vows to do a bigger stunt next time. That's it, over and over, and it may get bigger each time, but not better. Even a silly comedy, like a "Napoleon Dynamite" or a "Mr. Bean" movie needs a story arc, a progression for the character, and there just isn't one here. He just gets more and more injured as the stunts get more dangerous, and I don't happen to find that funny.
Admittedly there is a montage of Rod and his friends gradually raising the $5,000 they need to rent the buses and build the ramps for the big stunt, so they can generate the larger sum for his stepfather's operation, but these smaller stunts are largely failures, too. Why not get a job and earn money legitimately? By this point in the film, Rod has learned the truth about his father, so there's no need or motivation to continue on the stuntman career path, which he's no good at, anyway. There were probably a dozen better and more legitimate ways for him to raise $5,000, or $50,000 for that matter.
Reading the trivia section on IMDB just lowers my opinion even further - it turns out that the script was originally written with Will Ferrell in mind, so the whole thing's sort of a hand-me-down to the lesser comedian, Samberg, when Ferrell passed or wasn't available. Plus the whole story is a rip-off of another film, "Dirty Work" (where SNL stars played people raising $50,000 for a father's heart transplant) but they just changed the method of raising the money, which gave them another chance to rip off jokes from "Super Dave" Osborne. So really this is just stolen bits of pieces of other things just sort of stapled together to try and make something new, and I'm not impressed by that.
The bit with the "animal spirits" goes nowhere, same goes for the bit where the crowd following the hero striding down the street turns into a riot. The training montages, and even the "punch-dancing" scene in the woods also seem like mini-SNL skits, in that they never have resolutions or anything resembling endings, they all just sort of stop when the time is up. I'm guessing by default that none of this was meant to be taken seriously, ideally this is a parody of 80's underdog sports movies, but that would require a constant tone throughout, or at least for some of the jokes to land.
Well, at least I'm one step closer to the Summer Concert Series, and one step closer to the end of 2020. That's not much, but at least it's some consolation.
Also starring Andy Samberg (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Jorma Taccone (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Bill Hader (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Danny McBride (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Ian McShane (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Will Arnett (last heard in "Teen Titans Go! to the Movies"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Chester Tam (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Akiva Schaffer (ditto), Mark Acheson (last seen in "1922"), Alvin Sanders, Britt Irvin (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Brittany Tiplady, Andrew Moxham.
RATING: 3 out of 10 "secret" Tai chi moves
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