SuperSatellite ||

Akiva Schaffer, you are officially fired. Fired. Go to your office, pack your bags, and GTFO. Pam Brady, you too. Don’t even think about it, just leave. You both fail at movies. I watched Hot Rod yesterday, and it was the kind of bad that legends are made of. Not the good legends, but like the bad ones, ones no one remembers because thinking about it makes your brain hurt. They don’t have names for the evil that lurks in people’s souls that brings crap like this out.

I wish I could tell you Akiva Schaffer is known for some good movies in his past. He’s not, so just give up that hope right now. Like the Easter Bunny, the Holy Grail, or Will Farrell’s talent, it does not exist. He’s directed some Saturday Night Live. Oh, and a segment on some show called Channel 101. That’s it. After this movie, you can bet he won’t be lighting up the silver screen with new gems any time soon. Brady has written some South Park and other misc. TV shows. “How could this not turn in to Hollywood gold?!” you might be screaming in question at an unreasonable volume at your computer screen while sitting there in your underwear (…mmm….underwear readers…). Well, let me tell you, that particular equation actually comes out to epic fail.

The film truly had but one redeeming quality, and that is Isla Fisher, the cute starlet who is inexplicably married to Sacha Baron Cohen. But even that isn’t enough to justify spending a single dime on the film. It’s crazy, because I can normally pick crap out from trailers, but this film’s trailer made it look funny. I was fooled. That is a cruel and unfunny joke, however. Beneath the humorous trailer is a film made from anti-funny. Like matter and anti-matter, funny and anti-funny might appear similar at first glance, but they annihilate everything when they come in to contact.

Leading man Andy Samberg was painful in his portrayal of Rod Kimble. He was many things in the film: stale, dumb, unmotivated, uninspired. Things he wasn’t include: funny, creative, or engaged. Of course, what can you expect from a man who’s career highlight reel is capped with the Dick in a Box song. In fact, there isn’t a good character in the entire film. Isla Fisher is cute, yes, but the Denise character makes zero sense. All this is due to bad directing, and the worst writing I’ve heard in years. Example: The plot is driven by Rod, who gets into fights with his step dad to prove that he’s a man. Except he never wins, and the step dad’s heart starts failing, so Rod decides to do a stunt and raise the money to get him the heart transplant. So that he can beat him up. And prove his manhood. And the crazy part is, it plays out ten times worse than it even sounds.

There was hope in the plot. I am convinced that the right actors and writing can make any concept funny, and as dumb as it sounds, you see moments of potential here and there. Rather than take advantage of it, I genuinely believe the producers sat down and calculated ways to crush any chance whatsoever of anything being done right in the film. It’s so bad, it can’t be on accident. Somewhere, someone is having a good laugh over the whole thing, like it’s some stupid inside joke funny only to them, at the cost of millions of dollars.

FirstShowing.net terribly disappointed me here, giving it a 9 out of 10, and praising the very things that makes it awful. All I can imagine is that their reviewer was stoned, drunk, or confused with when April Fool’s Day is. Or maybe their review scale was flipped, and 10 would be like evilcarnagehitlerpornbad. In which case 9 is just really, really bad.

And that’s all I have to say on the matter. Don’t see it. Don’t think about seeing it. Don’t even talk to people who have seen it. Including me. I am poison now.