Director: Jake Kasdan
Cast: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig
Have I Seen it Before: Yep. Somehow, I once had the DVD on my shelf, but I got rid of it at some point, and I can’t quite account for it.
Did I Like It: I really did, for the most part! I liked it so much that I was mystified that the movie had so conclusively dropped off my radar in the years since its release. I even bought tracks of the soundtrack off of iTunes with some long-since abandoned, a fact that I only realized when I self consciously started singing along with some of the songs.
The film itself is in the best tradition of spoofs like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988), which is also pretty surprising. For one thing, the Apatow pedigree would be a more realistic comedy like The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007). For another, By the time this film has been released, I had mostly written off the joke as machine gun spoofs, largely because the experiment that was the Scary Movie franchise got out of the lab and flooded us with unwatchable dreck.
As much as the film might entertain, especially in its opening minutes when the tragedy of Cox’s childhood (and the trappings of similar biopics) is writ large, the film does run a little bit out of gas. Call me a sucker for absurdism but redeeming Cox and grounding him back in reality saps the film of its best laughs. A little bit of that manic energy remains until the end, but you can’t quite measure up to a game of chicken with a tractor and a bull.
But that the music in the film works on its own grounds is what makes it a treat to revisit after all this time. Just as soon as the runtime ended on Netflix, I put the soundtrack back on my Apple Music list. Welcome back, Dewey. It’s been a while.