Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (Adventures in Atrocity)

I’ve become something of an avid Happy Madison hate-watcher over the course of the past decade. In recent years, Adam Sandler’s production company has become infamous for pumping out unusually bad comedies that play only to the lowest common denominator and look like they were shot on a cell phone. However, all this is allowed to continue because Happy Madison movies frequently do quite well, particularly the ones that star Sandler himself. Sandler’s little empire has become so powerful that he has allowed his goofy comedy friends to make their own movies. It’s actually kind of admirable; a movie star gets successful and uses his success to help jumpstart the careers of those he deems worthy.

The problem is that most of these projects a) are the worst, and b) aren’t always as successful as Adam Sandler joints. There was some initial success with Rob Schneider, but it didn’t take too long before the public realized their crimes. Others have hopped on the Happy Madison train, such as Dana Carvey (The Master of Disguise), David Spade (Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star) and, most confusingly, Allen Covert (Grandma’s Boy). The only recent non-Sandler success story has been Kevin James, whose films Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Zookeeper have been embraced by the public. (Coming soon: James stars in Here Comes the Boom, about a biology teacher who moonlights as a mixed martial arts fighter. This is real, and there will be many fat jokes.) Last year’s Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star marks Sandler’s most recent attempt to give his friend a movie career, but it was landed with a thud so resounding that it made MacGruber look like Avatar.

Bucky Larson’s creative and financial failures helped to turn it into one of the more fascinating cinematic train wrecks in recent memory. While it was an incredibly cheap movie—my friends at Wikipedia place the budget at just under $10 million—it barely scraped up $2.5 million in its brief theatrical run. Even more notoriously: this film got a whopping 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Not even our old pal Armond would step up and declare Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star to be a misunderstood masterpiece about the intricacies of human sexuality or some crap. Based on its reception, you wouldn’t think this was a movie as much as it was Satan personified.

Since I am, as I’ve said before, a Happy Madison hate-watcher, I can assure you that everything about Bucky Larson sounded fascinating to me. However, I decided I wouldn’t dare and go see such a thing in a movie theater, as people might see me. Not until a couple weeks ago did the opportunity present itself to finally experience this crapsterpiece, and I put it in anticipating a wonderful disaster. Sadly, it’s just a disaster without a single “so bad its good” moment to be found. This is a series of miscalculations from frame one to the end credits, and how freeing it feels when the credits finally come.

Before I go any further, allow me to report that I recently saw the upcoming Happy Madison film That’s My Boy. I am planning to post my full review on Monday, and right now I won’t go into any more specifics than that. I will say that between that film and this one, I am developing a theory when it comes to Sandler’s brand of comedy: when a film is rated PG or PG-13, the awfulness is slightly offset by the fact that the rest of the proceedings have some level of innocence to them. When they go for the full R rating, any real sense of joy goes with it. I may be tipping my hand a bit, but Bucky Larson and this latest film seem to back that up. I won’t go much further into this now, as more will be discussed in the full That’s My Boy review.

As far as Bucky Larson is concerned, the tone and idiocy of the film is set within the first few seconds. The movie fades in, we hear Roger Miller’s “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” and we get a couple establishing shots of Midwestern farmland. Unimaginative, sure, but fine enough. We then see two red-headed twins shooting a scarecrow, because those hicks sure love them guns, don’t they? This is followed by a more innocuous shots of farm folk doin’ farm stuff, but then comes the coup de grace: we watch as a farmer drops his pants, smears peanut butter all over his genitals and then beckons a few goats to come lick it off. This, in the mind of Swardson, Sandler and the aforementioned Covert (who co-wrote), qualifies as a joke. This is not something that ever comes back later, nor do I believe we ever see this demented character again. It is meant to be inherently funny, but instead it’s gross and off-putting. Not exactly the way you want to start off your goofy comedy.

This “humor” is not exclusive to Bucky Larson. All Happy Madison movies seem to believe that simply suggesting the existence of private parts or bodily fluid is good enough to get a laugh. For some it is, I guess. But I prefer to laugh at actual jokes or humorous character moments. Having some random dude give his goats a peanut-butter-and-penis sandwich isn’t quite enough to win me over, and if you are going to go that far you’re going to have to earn it first. There’s a moment at the end of 21 Jump Street (SPOILER) where Rob Riggle has to pick his dismembered penis off of the pavement with his mouth. Is it a little much? Yes. But the film around it was good enough that I wasn’t actively repelled by it.

I realize that this movie is supposed to exist in an absurd universe. How else could you explain its downright loony depiction of the Midwest, or an early scene in which Bucky is fired from the grocery store by his ridiculous boss for doing absolutely nothing? But setting your movie in an absurd universe does not give you a free pass.

Anyway, the film lasts about five minutes before we are thrust head-first into the plot. One night Bucky goes over to his friend’s house to watch an adult movie, and it isn’t long before they all realize that the couple in said movie is actually Bucky’s parents. For some reason this excites the young lad, and he jets off to California to become a pornographic film star. He has decided that this is his calling. At first he is turned down because he isn’t particularly well-endowed—there are many jokes about how it looks like he has a vagina, ha ha ha—but one enterprising director (Don Johnson) decides to turn this into an asset. It isn’t long before Bucky is winning adult entertainment awards and wooing aspiring waitress Christina Ricci. That’s right, I said “aspiring waitress.” That is her dream, and it is established early and often.

One common trait in bad R-rated comedies is that they spend 90 minutes treating their characters like absolute garbage, and then expect the audience to sympathize with them during all the third act drama. Good R-rated comedies work because they have some affection for their characters and the screenplay makes them worth caring about through all the crudity. Movies like Bucky Larson send their leads through an endless series of brutal and humiliating events and expect us to laugh at it. It doesn’t help when your protagonist is a lame sketch character at best, but there is very little good-natured fun to be found here. We simply sit back and watch as Bucky strips down in front of others, is laughed at, exploited, and thrown from rooftops. This is not my idea of a good time, particularly since we’re laughing at the misfortune of an obviously mentally challenged man-child with buck teeth. If we saw anyone bullying such a person in real life, we’d call the authorities.

Everything about this movie is a miscalculation, and if there were any jokes in the screenplay they are lost on director Tom Brady, who makes this film in such a straightforward manner that unknowing people might think this is an incredibly bizarre drama. (Insert obvious joke about this not being the famous quarterback Tom Brady, who might be a better filmmaker.) Not that it gets any better when viewed through that lens, but at least then we’re acknowledging that there isn’t a whole lot comedic about this movie. The filmmaking is so inept and uninspired that it can’t even pull off the clichéd third act conflict correctly. You could probably guess the broad strokes: Ricci and Swardson are getting along famously, then something inevitably pulls them apart only for them to get back together in the end. I checked, and there are about nine minutes of screen time in between the break-up and the reconciliation. Even then, the reasons for this break-up are as flimsy as I’ve ever heard, and there are a lot of bad movies out there.

I’ve seen Swardson in other things, and in the right role he’s actually quite funny. (He has a Comedy Central sketch show called Nick Swardson’s Pretend Time that I have not seen, but supposedly it has its fans.) Yet because he latched on to the Happy Madison brand, his first crack at being a film star is likely to be his last. He will continue to play the sidekick in Adam Sandler movies—he has a small and slightly depressing role in That’s My Boy—but it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing his name above the title again anytime soon. Is it sad? Sure. But he had his shot, and this is the movie he decided to make.