Hot Rod
October 10th 2007 00:49
If you haven't been keeping your nose in the internet recently, you might not have heard about this lunatic comedy called Hot Rod from Andy Samberg and his buddy, director Akiva Schaffer.
No? Don't know what I'm on about? They're the chuckleheads behind those outrageous SNL Digital Shorts, such as Lazy Sunday:
Someone decided to give these wisecracking jokers a bunch of money and sent them off to make a movie. Schaffer et. al. decided to make a fusion between Jackass and a satire on every 80s underdog/sports movie ever made, but the final product is something that feels like a muddled nightmare in the mind of the Mad Hatter.
It's a terrible movie, really. The acting is ludicrous, the dialogue is awful and the story is irrelevant.
But it is funny. Really funny. So funny, in fact, that during one scene, which drags on for about two minutes, I was laughing so hard that tears came shooting out of my eyes. That's not normal.
In a nutshell: Samberg plays Rod Kimble, the son of a dead stuntman that wants to grow up in his father's image. He's an awful stuntman and his stunts usually end in a Super Dave Osbourne-style fiasco.
The reviews for the movie have been pretty poor, with most reviewers saying things like 'aims low and misses the target' or from Reel.com
"So lazy and so void of even the most rudimentary sense of storytelling that it showers the viewer with contempt...I've never felt as abused by a filmmaker as I did in Hot Rod."
Ouch. What these reviewers may be missing, though, is that Hot Rod is a delicious parody/homage of countless movies from our youths, complete with the awful hair-metal soundtracks and training montages.
In fact, I agree with Roger Ebert, who found the film to be passionate and unique enough to give it praise:
"The movie is funny because it is sincere. It likes Rod. It doesn't portray him as a maniacal goofball, but as an ambitious kid who really thinks, every single time, that he will succeed. In creating this aura of sincerity, "Hot Rod" benefits from Spacek's performance: She plays the mom absolutely straight, without inflection, as if she were not in a comedy. That's the only right choice; supporting characters are needed to reinforce Rod, not compete with him."
Samberg and the crew made the movie that they wanted to make... there's no script rewrites to please children or families, no merchandising moments or political dodgeball. It's all from the heart, it seems, which makes it easy enough to watch. It's like you grew up down the street from these guys, and they made a movie over the summer and asked you round to watch it. With a couple of beers and hamburgers on the grill, it's a compliment to the creativity of a couple of suckers with too much time on their hands. You'd laugh out loud, I bet.
I say: If you can appreciate the stupidity of Adam Sandler, Mr. Bean or the Zucker brothers, you'll laugh at this. In the next decade, it might reclaim cult status.
See it for: The last fight scene. Woo boy.
*this image is from the IMDb site on Hot Rod
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