Martin Bishop (shiftyeyeddog)

I knew going in I probably wasn't going to love this. After all, I find Mel Brooks "comedies" to be the lamest, lowest-common-denominator style of comedy, full of unfunny puns and slapstick overacting. But I like musicals, so I thought I might at least get some enjoyment out of it. I should give it a shot.

It's even worse than I thought.

The first scene with Lane and Broderick, which seems to go on for about half an hour, is agonizing and interminable, I almost turned it off (again - I started watching it once LONG ago and never made it through that scene), but I powered through and kept watching. The movie never got much better. The songs themselves are slightly less awful, but the rest of the film is just too rooted in bad Mel Brooks style. The performances are equally painful, even from some of the otherwise-decent actors. (What the hell happened to you, Matthew Broderick?!?) It's so overdone and exaggerated - fine if you're playing to a large live theater, but in a movie that kind of exaggeration is not needed and just comes across as dumb.

One of the worst movies I have ever seen.

There was a time when Sandra Bullock made movies I enjoyed - Speed, While You Were Sleeping, A Time To Kill... She then moved on to making not particularly good, but harmless movies (The Proposal, Miss Congeniality, etc). Now her descent into complete crap is complete.

To be fair, it's mostly not her fault. She's still pretty much in Congeniality-style mediocrity mode, while Melissa McCarthy is what makes this film practically unwatchable. A little Melissa McCarthy goes a long way, especially when she just plays variations on the same character in every single film she does. The only difference here is the addition of hundreds of F-bombs.

It's always annoying when movies like horror or action flicks tone everything down just to get a PG13 rating to sell more tickets. But equally stupid is to artificially reach for an R. This film is exactly the kind of comedy that sits firmly in PG13 territory, but here they have bafflingly shoehorned in tons of cussing for no apparent reason. I have no moral objection to it - hell, I use profanity like punctuation - but here it just feels out of place and serves no purpose. It adds nothing to the film. The irony of it is, the same women who will laugh their asses off at this movie would complain about the unnecessary excessive profanity if the exact same language was in a teen comedy or something.

But the bottom line is that this "comedy" just isn't funny. The jokes are lame, unoriginal, obvious, and repetitive. I think I chuckled a total of four times. The only thing enjoyable about it was spotting supporting actors I like and feeling sorry for them being in this - Tom "Biff Tannen" WIlson, Kaitlin Olson from "Always Sunny", Taran Killam, Michael Rappaport, ...even Joey McIntyre from NKOTB shows up.

That being said, this movie will probably be wildly successful. The lonely cat ladies who made up 90% of the audience were cackling and howling at every single pathetic attempt at humor. These people must not watch very many movies. Their humor barometers are WAY off.