Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star Movie Review
It’s not every day you get to spend 97 minutes praying for a merciful death.
Can someone give me a clue what exactly happened to Adam Sandler? Did he fall on his head? Stop taking his funny medication? Been abducted by aliens and replaced with a doppelganger, human in all appearances but intellectually and culturally an extraterrestrial, from an alien planet where they find semen jokes funny and not at all cringe-worthy? He has had 24 different film and TV roles since the Waterboy and none of them are even remotely funny. A case could be made that Punch Drunk Love was an attempt at a serious career, but I found the movie disjointed and honestly funnier than You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. The trailers for his upcoming movie, Jack and Jill, where he plays his own twin sister (always a winning move), makes being trapped Chilean coal mine for months look like a pleasant alternative. I love the fact that he calls his production studio Happy Madison, in an attempt to make you think one of his current movies is on par with two of his decent ones.
So, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star. Adam is not in it, but wrote it and you can smell his hands all over the script. The story is of young Bucky Larson (Nick Swardson, who has been in a ton of junk. The only thing that caught my eye was 30 Minutes or Less and a bit role in Blades of Glory. Otherwise it’s all stuff like Just Go With It), a bucktoothed hayseed from Iowa with a salad bowl haircut. He discovers his parents were porn stars in the 70’s and decides he needs to move to LA to follow in their footsteps (Debbie Does Dallas image courtesy of the movie t shirts).
God, even recounting the story is painful. I’m going to blaze through it. Turns out Bucky has a micro phallus. He meets a director who discovers everyone loves him as a star because he is so small he makes ordinary guys look huge. He meets a super hot waitress (Christina Ricci – Sleepy Hollow, Speed Racer (ugh), Grey’s Anatomy, Pan Am) who works in a crappy diner, dreams of being a waitress, and has a fear of soup. She is also a virgin and yet somehow totally cool with Bucky getting into porn. There is some kind of antagonist, but the conflict is so non-consequential it doesn’t even register. An awkward romance progresses, and the only issues in it have nothing to do with any of the normal crap and more to do with a misunderstanding. Love reigns supreme at the end. My brain feels like I lost 8 IQ points as the movie progressed.
The stars. Umm. Geez. Christina Ricci was hot, although her character made me want to projectile vomit. One star. There were a couple secondary characters who were 100 times more engaging than Bucky, his girlfriend, and his parents put together. Specifially the porn director, his nephew, the porn producer, and the antagonist porn star (Don Johnson, Tyler Spindel, Ido Mosseri, and Stephen Dorff respectively). One star. There was some bare breast, but in a movie about porn there was hardly any, and it was mostly eclipsed by having to look at Bucky’s face all the time. One star. Total: three stars.
The black holes. Forced me to look at the Bucky Larson face the whole movie. Sorry, but that is not something that gets easier over time. It actually gets worse. One black hole. Having to see Bucky naked full frontal. One black hole. About 100,000,000 micro phallus jokes. One black hole. There was no real story at all. Once Bucky got to LA there was no real conflict or issues. Two black holes. Bucky’s parents were super annoying in all regards. One black hole. Bucky’s friends made me wish that bullying was still cool. As a group they all deserved about 100 wedgies a day. One black hole. Christina Ricci’s character was so unbelievable in all regards that she made the giant penguin from Billy Madison look like a viable supporting character. One black hole. The dialog was painful. One black hole. The story had little to do with any kind of reality. One black hole. The ending flew out of the ether. One black hole. Two more black holes for completely wasting two hours of my life. Total: 13 black holes.
So a total of ten black holes. Do not see this movie. Do not rent this movie. If you happen to be walking by a theater showing this movie and you see it is on fire, do not call 911. Trust me, odds are anyone watching it would rather burn to death and you are doing them a favor (I’m kidding, of course. Please call 911. Just don’t expect the people inside to thank you). Just let it rot on the pile of bad Adam Sandler films like Big Daddy, the Zookeeper, and Grown-ups.
Good sized Warhammer tournament coming up this weekend, and I’m pretty sure my friends are all planning on drinking afterwards, so I don’t know if I will get any movies watched. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. I have been doing more Tweets, a lot of them nerd movie related.
I think tomorrow I might do more of my Star Trek retrospective. Talk to you soon.
Dave
