Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/22/09
If
you're like me and have extended your love of the movies to doing a little
screenwriting on the side, you're probably familiar with this feeling.
You've got an idea, an awesome, AWESOME idea, with only one flaw:
no one would ever do the things your idea requires them to do. But
the idea's awesome, so you swallow hard and invent a Ridiculous Contrivance
that inspires them to do that awesome stuff. Alas, as you're writing,
you find that the Ridiculous Contrivance is tied to your Awesome Idea like
cans to the back of a Newlyweds' car, and you keep having to feed and water
it on Every Stinkin' Page, dragging down the awesomeness. The long-delayed
comedy Fanboys has such a screenplay, a wacky lark about five friends
who try to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in 1998 to steal a
copy of the yet-unreleased Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
and see it before anyone else. Cool idea, only no one would ever
do that. So writers Ernest Cline, Adam F. Goldberg and Dan Pulick
have swallowed hard and given one of the friends terminal cancer that will
ensure he doesn't live to see the movie's Memorial Day 1999 release.
And you know, nothing says wacky road trip comedy like terminal cancer!
Despite this, and a general raggedness inspired by years of re-editing
and reshooting, Fanboys' heart is in the right place. Geeks
in general and Star Wars geeks in particular will enjoy a lot of
the silly in-jokes and army of cameos. But probably not the cancer.
The
year is 1998. Until three years ago (when the year was 1995), Eric
(Sam Huntington) used to be best friends with Linus (Chris Marquette):
they shared a love of comic books and all things Star Wars.
But Eric felt the tug to join the family business, specifically a car lot
owned by his father Big Chuck (Christopher McDonald). A chance meeting
at a party reunites the old friends, along with Linus's pals outrageous
Hutch (Dan Fogler) and geeky Windows (Jay Baruchel), who work at a comic
book store with Zoe (Kristen Bell). Conversation turns to a decade-old
plan by the crew to bust into the Skywalker Ranch and steal the next Star
Wars movie George Lucas makes, now relevant again with The Phantom
Menace just months from release. But old tensions flare up again
and Linus and Eric again part ways in a huff. Hutch and Windows show
up at the lot the next day to tell Eric the truth Linus has kept hidden:
he's dying, and will not survive to see Episode 1. The very
same day, Big Chuck announces to Eric that he's giving the business to
him. It's now or never, and Eric decides to go all in for one last
weekend of friendship and geekery, getting the four boys together for a
road trip to steal and watch the new Star Wars flick. They
crowd into Hutch's Millennium Falcon-styled van (whatever you do, don't
push the red button!) and embark on the trip, which pivots on a trip to
Texas to meet Windows' online girlfriend Rogue Leader and a pit stop in
Iowa to battle Star Trek fans led by the buck-toothed Admiral Seasholtz
(Seth Rogan). But obstacles await... jail time, a race to Las Vegas
to get the Skywalker Ranch plans, and Linus's failing health. Will
they ever see The Phantom Menace?
There
is, of course, a second elephant in Fanboys' room, that being that
Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace kinda sucked.
The film does a lot better with that particular issue (the last line is
a hoot), but it does have a way of negating the specialness of the gang's
journey. Of course, that journey in general would be a lot more special
if Fanboys wasn't really running a generic genre outline (the
road trip comedy) inserting the Star Wars stuff into the gaps.
The Brawl With An Enemy Gang, the Misunderstanding With Vegas Hookers,
the Rendezvous With An Online Girlfriend Who's Not What You Think, the
High On Peyote sequence leading to the Fleeing From Cops Because There's
Drugs In The Van scene; they're all here, and no new ground is broken in
any of those areas.
But
the movie should work for Star Wars buffs because it does have its'
geeky referential humor down. We geeks love to hear our favorite
lines quoted in new contexts, arguments about things like whether Princess
Leia could possibly have been attracted to Luke when he was really her
brother (“That's just SICK, man!”), and to see every kind of cameo appearance
by our favorite stars you can cook up. And Fanboys can cook
up a lot of different kinds of cameos. Try to follow me here:
Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams and presumably Ray Park exist as real
people in the movie's world, but the actors appear here as other characters.
William Shatner both exists as and appears as himself (he's a hoot, and
sets up a nice running joke). Harry Knowles exists (although why
a movie would feature an appearance by the Ain't It Cool News webmaster
but feel the need to tell us who he is baffled me), but he's played by
someone else (Ethan Suplee). Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes are billed
as themselves, but could be anyone. And non-genre familiar faces
like Danny Trejo and Jamie King pop up along the way as assorted other
characters. Director Kyle Newman keeps the movie's spirits high,
sometimes even unduly so. And the characters' worlds are filled with
nice silly touches like the extreme similarities between the inside of
Hutch's van and Han Solo's ship (although Han would not appreciate that
“SLAVE-2” license plate), right down to its' refusal to start up until
you bang on the dashboard a couple times..
But
the real icing on the cake is the climax, the storming of Skywalker Ranch,
imagined here as a Star Wars fan might build it himself. Rooms
are separated by the same kind of airlock doors that appear in the movies,
props (even from Willow?!?) are everywhere, and a security force
prowls the halls dressed in mysterious helmets and masks that make them
look like Star Wars characters who ended up on the cutting room
floor. There's even a garbage chute leading to a very familiar-looking
location. Pity Lucas himself does not appear, but I give him lots
of credit for signing off on a movie that loves him to pieces but isn't
afraid to bring him down a peg or two as well.
The
performances are serviceable. Fogler probably does the Jack Black
thing better than Black himself, while Baruchel has no trouble disappearing
into the stock Geek with Glasses role. Bell is effectively sassy,
although she can't surmount the fact that the script requires her to be
in love with Windows mostly because he represents all the audience members
who wouldn't mind a shot with her themselves. Marquette is probably
doing the movie's best pure work because he's tasked with making a cancer
subplot the movie's far too lightweight to support work. Not that
it does, but I never blamed Linus for bringing us down.
Of
course, some of that has to do with the fact that it's probably the least
realistic movie cancer of our generation. We're told he's “tried
everything”, but his cancer remains a secret. If you've still got
hair and haven't lost a pound, I'm pretty sure you haven't tried everything.
And Fisher's Doctor tells everyone he's too sick to go on, but then gives
him a bottle of pills and a moment later he's scaling walls busting into
the Ranch. And I'm pretty sure that if you checked his pulse in his
last moment on-screen, you'd find that his death scene was cut so tight
it's now ambiguous whether he died or not because his time just runs out
like a clock with an old battery.
The
one geeky area where the movie falls short is in its' depiction of Star
Trek fans. Not that I don't think that could have been funny,
particularly given the eternal emnity between the fans of the two Star
franchises (Stargate sits it out, glimpsed momentarily on a TV screen).
But while a lot of the Trekkie jokes sound funny on paper, the performances
are universally bad, led by Rogan who lets his buck teeth do all his acting
for him. In a movie that's already struggling with a reality gap,
those guys have wandered in off SNL, and not one of the good seasons.
Fanboys
has been cut, recut, shot, reshot, screened and rescreened so long that
it was part of my very first Summer Movie Preview
back in 2007. Parts of the movie weren't even directed by Newman
(Stephen Brill supervised reshoots in late 2007). But no amount of
tinkering was ever going to get past the fact that the movie is deeply,
deeply flawed conceptually. What remains is an in-joke fest that
will please those on its' wavelength and pretty much no one else.
You Know Who You Are. |
