Alyson Hannigan

Or, How to Ruin a Relationship Before it Starts

First thing’s first - if you take a date to this movie, don’t expect it to progress much beyond the holding hands stage; your date will likely want to go straight home - alone. In the long and wobbly path of the slapstick satire, which started with The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, this is undoubtedly the worst, most uninspired, boring and badly conceived effort put forth. It’s a shame that such a talented cast is given such bad material. I literally laughed one time in the entire movie, and only had two or three small smirks cross my face; that’s not a good track record for a big budget Hollywood comedy.

The only thing that kept entering my mind while sitting through this flick was that it reminded me of several skits my friends and I wrote for our drama class when we were fourteen years old. Painfully bad and obvious set-ups that give only lame returns were the order of the day when I was in grade eight, and they seem to be the order of the day here as well. If I had known that I could become a Hollywood screenwriter by penning stupid jokes about zits and midgets, I would have taken drama right through High School. Or stayed fourteen years old and moved to California.

For what it’s worth, the story concerns a girl named Julia (Alyson Hannigan in a fat suit) who yearns for her Prince Charming. After a visit to a ‘date doctor’ and a makeover at an autobody shop (?) that trims a few hundred pounds and curls her hair just so, she meets the man of her dreams, Grant Funckyerdodder (effeminate Adam Campbell). He meets her parents, she meets his and they get married. Roll credits.

Unfortunately, writers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer try hard to stuff as many jokes as they can into every scene, trying to lampoon as many movies as possible as many times as they can get away with, and a few more for the road. Many scenes and even entire sub-plots exist solely to set up a single joke that usually falls flat. It’s painful to watch... I simply can’t overstate how un-funny and forced these jokes are.

As I said, there’s a lot of talent that goes to waste here. Hannigan has golden comic timing, as proven on Buffy and in the low-brow but funny American Pie movies, but why she took this movie, I’ll never know. Fred Willard, who plays Bernie Funckyerdodder, seems to be enjoying his slow slide to crappy movie stardom. He’s got a long list of comedy credits going back to the mid-60’s and has proven his comedic mastery many times over (This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show). Maybe he needed a quick paycheck? There are a few other familiar faces, most of them chosen to poke fun at racial or physical differences and a few obvious gross-out scenes that go on waaaaaayyyyyyy too long.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen literally 90% of the jokes in the film, most of them with a few seconds of silence built in in anticipation of throngs of laughter. But in the theatre I saw it in, the only thing you could hear were the crickets outside. Brutal.