There are few genres that are harder to make successful than comedy. Accordingly, the bad ones are the most unbearable to watch; a bad drama may fizzle early on but have you not realize it until the end, while a bad comedy is immediately acknowledgeable because you don’t laugh. Such is the case with this movie.
Admittedly, I did laugh once, and it was the same part where every person to whom I’ve spoken about the movie also laughed, and it’s a throwaway gag that could have just as easily been slipped into another movie and made a successful guffaw.
With a concept free from intrigue, interactions free from humor, and a main character devoid of any interesting traits, it’s hard to fathom what about this movie was attractive when it came time to make it. The eponymous hero, a small town loser with unnecessarily gigantic teeth, discovers that his parents were once porn sensations and decides to embark on a quest to become one as well.
To say that nothing works is an overstatement. There is the one dirty gag that induces laughs, and the film has a recognizable act structure, but other than that, there isn’t much. All of the actors, with the exception of Christina Ricci, are bland and uninteresting; the particular of note is Stephen Dorff playing a porn iteration of Brett Michaels. It seems like he came to the movie ready to act and have fun, which any comedic actor should, but ends up lacking direction in any one scene. Small wonder, since the director’s pervious efforts only include The Comebacks and The Hot Chick, and the movie is co-produced by Adam Sandler, whose Happy Madison production label seems to exist solely to make movies only slightly worse than his.
In the unwritten index of bad films, this one rates as a non-entity; it’s not a flat-out failure like Atlas Shrugged, an enjoyable dud like The Room, nor is it an infamous bomb like Ishtar. I suppose it’s better than Abduction, which had the distinction of not only being bad but also being unintelligible, but in the absence of a name like Taylor Lautner being bandied about, it’s likely to be forgotten.
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