'The Comebacks' can't come close
Published Oct. 23, 2007
What can be said to recommend "The Comebacks," the latest movie built on the shaky "Date Movie" formula? I'll start: It's screened in dark theaters, so if you're a movie critic or otherwise enjoined to see it against your will, no one will know that you're there. It's got good comic actors — Melora Hardin and David Koechner from "The Office," Will Arnett from "Arrested Development" — who should really know better. And it's 84 minutes long, which is short enough that walking out halfway through the movie should get you home in time to catch the last part of an hour-long episode of "Law & Order." Should you stumble into "The Comebacks" on accident, I guarantee you it will be the worst 20 minutes of your life.
To call this movie brain-dead is an insult to people who are brain-dead because brain-dead people do not, by and large, strive to be in such a state. "The Comebacks" tries extremely hard throughout. David Koechner stars as the worst coach in American history, an all-time loser, who takes over a small college football program. At the risk of spoiling one of the subtlest jokes in the entire movie, their logo looks like a penis. Get it? Because penises are funny. The "spoofed" movies are mentioned and then discarded, with the joke apparently in the fact that one movie is mentioning another movie and not in any clever treatment of that movie's tropes. Stop me if you've heard this before: Rocky Balboa is old! Sometimes there isn't even a joke; the "Field of Dreams" reference is just that: a reference, and that's all.
Like "Epic Movie" and "Date Movie" before it, it confuses blank imitation with parody, and parody with comedy. A social satirist might use the protagonist of football weepie "Radio" to skewer the way we, as a society, treat handicapped people; a parodist might joke about how inane and sentimental the plot was. "The Comebacks" says: You know what's funnier than a retarded guy, like on "Radio"? That same retarded guy, only he loves to hump people's legs! Like all of these movies, half of the budget appears to have been spent on finding actors, who kind of look like other actors, that are desperately in need of work. This has to be what "South Park," the reigning social satirist of this generation, looks like to people who can't speak English: offensive and meaningless humor for people confused by the subtlety of the "Looney Tunes" episodes they watched when they were younger.
"The Comebacks" is the ultimate result of a series that has, from the first "Scary Movie," gotten progressively dumber and pandered to progressively dumber slices of audience. Eventually a movie gets so dumb that there just isn't anyone dumb enough to enjoy it, and judging by the film's modest opening weekend at the box office, I can only hope that now is that time. But I will say one thing for it: That theater's awfully dark.
