Sure, this is a lame comedy, and surprisingly, I wanted to see this because I’m a big fan of Jason Lee. The movie is so silly and inept it’s pretty enjoyable. It’s not hard to see that much of the dialogue in the movie is improvised, especially by “comedian” Tom Green who looks like he made up his entire monologues. At one point he throws a paper ball into a car at a girl, and you can tell she wasn’t expecting it. Tom Green manages to be funny in some very rare parts of the movie and had me chuckling occasionally. Jason Lee whose starred in great films like “Dogma” and “Almost Famous” is a pretty good straight man in the film and just stands around reacting to Tom Green’s foolishness.
Mafia films, westerns, pirate films, and now Comedies. These are the genres that are rapidly going extinct in the movie world. Watching such movies like this and “Van Wilder” has convinced me that the comedy is slowly becoming extinct; why? Because studios care more about marketable movies than funny movies. This has possibly the worst script I’ve ever heard in a movie. I had to wonder if half the time the actors were improvising because either it was suggested or because the screenwriters had no material. You can tell that most of Tom Green and John C. McGinley’s lines are so shorthanded and half assed, it left me in awe of their stupidity. Tom Green couldn’t act if his life depended on it and in this he just uses the same inept ADD shtick.
The plot is completely lame to begin with and uninteresting: Jim, who is a workaday guy has to find a way to get 30,000 dollars for his niece to go to Harvard after he promises it to her on a home video which look so fake and creates a large plot hole. It seems the directors don’t even bother to clean up many of the faulty points of the flick yet expect the audience to buy it. Why would a shop keeper keep a load of lottery money in a brown box under his store counter? Who was holding up the video camera when Jim promises his niece he’ll pay for her college education? How is it possible to buy spray paint in a toy store? The movie creates these gaping plotholes and instantly tends to lose sight of its actual plot, a journey to get money for his niece’s education and sedge ways into these completely inept plotlines like a man who is obsessed with his dead wife so he gets burglars to pretend to be her at gun point, and a faulty bank robbing ploy.
It’s staggering how there’s basically little to no emphases on the relationship between Jim and his niece. She’s only featured for about a half a quarter of the movie and we forget about her instantly. Also, there are some good actors in this movie who are wasted with thankless minor roles like John C. McGinley as a bald detective, Dennis Farina as John’s father in law, and Megan Mullally as John’s loving but trailer trash sister. There could have been a lot of funnier things the writers could have done with these characters. Jason Lee, whom I’m a big fan of, looks bored throughout the period of this movie and acts like a cardboard cutout throughout the entire length. Alas, he’s a great actor, but not even he could save this stinker. With only an occasional laugh here and there, this is just another of the many stinky comedies to come around in years.