Good comedy is a rarity and a beautiful art to master. Freud describes comedy as the observation of the abnormalities of the world around us. In order to understand what makes something funny a person must be keenly aware of what makes our lives "normal". I am not sure why I would make the effort in bringing Freud into a review of "Night at the Roxbury" which almost exhausted me in my attempt to find something humorous in one of the dullest, sorriest attempts of a comedy in my recent memory.
Will Farrell and Chris Kattan star in this (barely) feature-length movie, adapted from their Saturday Night Live Sketch about the Butabi brothers, Steve and Doug. They play a couple of hapless bimbos whose goals in life seem to consist of starting up their own night club as well as gaining entrance into the nightlife hot spot, the Roxbury. It doesn't say how old they are, but I would place them somewhere in their twenties. They spend their evenings club-hopping, hair-spraying, pick up-lining, and synchronized head-bouncing, all in effort to dance their idiotic dances with impossibly busty women. Their was an odd incestuous, homoeroticism between them that probably was owed to them sharing a room even though they live in a huge house in L.A., as well as them fixing each others' hair while clad only in speedos or wrapped in tiny, tiger print towels. At any rate, their relation is peculiar, and not ha-ha odd.
Together they create almost a quarter of a character, and with the rest of their cast almost make up half of one. Their world seems to be filled with people as one-dimensional and uninteresting as themselves, though they all seem to walk about with an air of superiority, bullying the two brothers who seem to be too lifeless to notice an insult when it hits them.
After gaining entrance into the Roxbury following an accidental encounter with their hero, Richard Grieco (played by himself), they are able to gain entrance, an experience giving Steve "hottie overload!" There they are singled out by two suspiciously pretty women who think the Butabi brothers are a part of the entourage of club owner Benny Zadir (Chazz Palminteri). The movie makes the argument that sex equals love (though I think that offering that this film "argues" anything would be giving it too much credit) after the guys assume that these two women are their girlfriends after sleeping with them.
Other stuff happens which is none too interesting: head bouncing, a fallout between Steve and Doug, head bouncing, a wedding, more head bouncing, I forget the rest--I think I chose to forget the rest.
I sat in my seat waiting for some semblance of a joke to appear, only to be let down in a grueling 85 minutes of Farrell and Kattan flapping their arms about and doing bad impersonations of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", though I'm not sure that this was their intention. Good comics doing bad comedy--infuriatingly bad comedy--is far worse than bad comics doing bad comedy for the obvious reason that they should know better.
Even if their were moments that were just shy of being funny it would have been an insult to laugh at them. I'm not sure if they even desired to make people laugh or if they just assumed that the people who watched the movie would laugh simply because they knew their sketch. It would have been insulting, not to them, but every comic who sits down and puts in some sort of effort into their work, successful or not. This film made me angry more than anything else because I know that when it was released into theaters there was an audience who paid their $8.00 to laugh, and all they were given was lifeless drivel full of unfunny inside jokes, and gags done and redone to the same laughless effect. Farrell and Kattan still got their money, but in no way did they earn it.
This movie simply defeated me.
0/4
*Note: I almost gave this 0.5/4 simply because of a bit role by Jennifer Coolidge. She has maybe three lines and a minute of screen time, but I can't help but love her. I'm really at a loss why.
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