Last night, I went to see "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" with a couple of friends. I must say it wasn't the highest on my list of "things to see" that came out this weekend in theaters, but it was the right movie for our frame of mind. We were all varying degrees of exhausted, and decided that we weren't looking for a movie that would make any great demands on us.How much that mindset or that level of fatigue factored in, I can't say for sure, but we all got a lot of laughs out of the movie. It's an absolutely spot on shreding of the ubiquitous biography "event movies" engineered almost disingenuously for the purpose of garnering Oscar nominations. It had all the clichés, pushed an extra notch over the top -- actors playing characters of proposterously different ages, manufactured moments of "when a songwriter first invented the lyrics that would become famous," the biography subject coming from a hard and humble beginning, and so much more.
The acting is great throughout. John C. Reilly is... well... a rock star in this movie. He's been quietly playing supporting "character actor" type roles for years, and finally gets the center stage he deserves. Jenna Fischer is as hilarious here in this fantastical world as she is in her very realistic and more subtle role on The Office. Kristen Wiig, the only reason I didn't stop watching Saturday Night Live about a year sooner than I did, is a riot.
And the scene featuring The Beatles is the funniest thing that has been put on film this year. Paul Rudd as John Lennon leads four hysterically miscast actors doing the most deliberately bad impressions of the Fab Four you could ever hope to see. They're exaggerated, stereotyped caricatures that had me laughing to the point I couldn't catch a breath. This single scene is worth seeing the movie for.
But unfortunately, that's also pretty much where the movie peaks. Razor-sharp and witty up until that point, things start to get a bit repetitive and boring after that. It's very strange to say that a movie that lasts barely an hour and a half felt "too long," but that's the truth of it. In the last 30 minutes, the same set of running gags finally start to lose steam, the fake songs aren't so clever, and I felt myself starting to check my watch. I wouldn't say it fell apart so badly that I wouldn't recommend seeing it, but it did derail a movie well on its way to an A in my book, to end up at a B+.
1 comment:
While I haven't seen this yet, I've read and heard similar reviews. Perhaps the writer or director deliberately made the last act boring since so many of the films Walk Hard skewers tend to stumble through their third acts.
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