director
Christopher
Guest
screenwriters
Mark Nutter
Tom Wolfe
Boyd Hale
producer
Denise Di Novi
cinematographers
Jeff Jur
Adam Kimmel
Kenneth MacMillan
music
Jeffrey C.J. Vanston
editor
Ronald Roose
cast
Chris Farley (Bartholomew Hunt)
Matthew Perry (Leslie Edwards)
Eugene Levy (Guy Fontenot)
Kevin Dunn (Hidalgo)
Bokeem Woodbine (Jonah)
Lisa Barbuscia (Shaquinna)
Harry Shearer (Narrator)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 90m
u.s.
release: May 29, 1998
video
availability: VHS
other christopher
guest films
reviewed on this website:
- best
in show
- a
mighty wind
|
Almost
Heroes should never
have seen the light of a projector. Not because it's in bad taste
for Warner to make money from Chris Farley's last movie, although
the film is unavoidably creepy: There he is in his final performance,
guzzling whiskey and shrieking, pasty and dangerously overweight,
looking very much like a man who's about to die soon. No, the
movie should simply have been pronounced dead along with Farley
-- or at least unreleasable. God knows it's unwatchable.
A little of Chris Farley went a long way, as is the case with
many Saturday Night Live alumni: their relentless broad
shtick gooses a laugh out of you if kept to five-minute increments,
but at feature length it becomes obnoxious. Farley made me laugh
occasionally on SNL, but one look at the ads for his movies
told me exactly what I'd be missing: a fat guy whacking his head
on things for ninety minutes. In Almost Heroes, Farley,
playing a scruffy mountain guide named Bartholomew Hunt, does
a fair amount of witless slapstick. He confronts a vicious eagle;
he tumbles down mountains and gets slapped around.
Watching Almost Heroes becomes incredibly sad when you
recall that Farley badly wanted to do more substantive work,
like a biopic of Fatty Arbuckle. He never got the chance to do
better than this, and what's truly shocking about the movie is
that it was directed by Christopher Guest, who has done
better. His The Big Picture and Waiting for Guffman
-- not to mention Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, which
Guest co-wrote as well as co-starred in -- were razor-sharp digs
at the pretensions of show business. At Almost Heroes,
I sat blinking in the dark, completely baffled. Guest is on autopilot
here, halfheartedly staging the crude jokes, and I began to wonder
whether it was Farley who dragged his directors down all along.
The script, credited to Mark Nutter, Tom Wolfe (not the
Tom Wolfe, I'm sure) and Boyd Hale (a producer on Full House),
plays like a low-rent Mel Brooks comedy. It's 1804, and Farley's
Bartholomew Hunt is recruited by explorer Leslie Edwards (Matthew
Perry) to help him beat Lewis and Clark across the country to
the Pacific. The idea has promise; Guest sets up Edwards as a
foppish glory-hound who's willing to put his team (including
Eugene Levy, whose insanely jealous Frenchman is the movie's
only source of laughs) in serious danger so he can steal Lewis
and Clark's thunder.
But the movie just uses the plot as a string on which to hang
gags -- which is fine if the gags are funny. They aren't. Where
was Christopher Guest on the set? The movie has none of his prickly
verbal wit or deadpan sight gags. And the eerie subtext makes
matters worse. While Farley is carrying on like Falstaff on crank,
Matthew Perry stands around looking sickly and drained, his features
still gaunt from his much-publicized bout with painkillers. What
we're watching isn't a funny fat-thin team -- these are two guys
with massive health problems.
The stars' sickness and exhaustion eventually bleed the movie
dry. Almost Heroes meanders along, and Kevin Dunn (Godzilla)
shows up as a Spanish villain named Hidalgo, a pale copy of Mandy
Patinkin's Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. This smells
like a project that was dead from the get-go, and Chris Farley's
posthumous exertions cast a final pall. There he is, one last
time, knocking himself out for nothing. Poor bastard. He deserved
a better swan song; anybody deserves better than this. |
