Not to be modeled after

I caught this one on television the other day.  I remember thinking back to the trailer and saying to myself: "Self, that doesn't look too bad."  Mostly because it looked ridiculous and you have to understand most comedies these days suck.  Still, the trailer looked interesting, so I saw it.



Now, the reason I'm writing about this movie is on this blog is because it's a perfect example of my love-hate relationship with comedies these days.  Parts of it were funny (the scene from the trailer where the kid accuses Sean William Scott wanting him to take his pants off, Sean William Scott's reaction to the nerdy kid's speech), I mean laugh-out-loud funny.  There's a ton of LARPing (Live Action Role Playing, though it's not calling that in the movie) scenes.  I mean, battle scenes, it was pretty cool.  Also, Sean William Scott, Paul Rudd and their two kids come out at the end for the final LARP battle dressed as KISS!  I mean, exactly like KISS!  Those are the good parts.

The bad parts are well...bad.  Sean William Scott is an unrepetant womanizer.  He has sex with a girl at a party when he should be looking after his kid.  He gives a girl drugs to have sex with her, but they're sleeping pills, so she falls asleep.  So, he's not only a schmuck, he's a dumb schmuck.  Like, why wouldn't you check what you were giving the girl before you gave it to her.  Unless that was the whole point?  I don't get it, but it was pretty stupid.  The girl herself pissed me off.  She was engaged to this guy and kept rebuffing Scott's advances until they go camping.  Then she throws herself at him, stating that she's only loyal to her fiance "within the city limits of Los Angeles."  At that point, I just wanted Jason Vorhees to show up and kill her.

Then there's Scott's kid, this 10 year old black kid.  He starts out pretty funny, taking a hype on Scott's face (the scene from the trailer), but then he just becomes annoying.  A stereotypical poor black kid, he swears a lot, talks about woman's breasts all the times, talks about sex all the time and acts mean to everyone.  Yet, when Scott leaves him alone at the party and the kid walks home, you're supposed to feel sorry for him.  But, the kid really doesn't have any redeeming qualities.  He's not endearing, he's just an obnoxious little punk. 

The third member of this assness is Jane Lynch, the runner of the Big Brother-esque establishment that Rudd and Scott are serving time at.  She talks about being on drugs and all that and her past in drugs and how she was on drugs and how before she was this big administrator at "Sturdy Wings" she was on drugs...she mentions drugs every single time she shows up.  Like, without fail.  So, I've figured out what Americans do for humour.  They take a joke, beat it into the ground, get some morbidly obese men to sit on it, then they drop a nuke on it, then they hire the Vienna Boys Choir to march up and down on the joke 100,000 times in a day...like, it goes beyond beating a joke to death, it's the same friggin' punch line over and over again.  It wasn't that funny to begin with and it certainly isn't funny now that you've beaten it to death.

So, that's Role Models.  Another deeply flawed comedy in a galaxy of them.  You notice that there's not really any great comedians out there anymore, no great comedy teams.  You want to know why?  Because there are very few people in the movies who understand what makes movies funny.  This is just another in the line.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5