2001: A Space Travesty (2001) You'd think that a 90-minute slapstick comedy couldn't possibly inflict such pain, but I actually had to consult an acupuncturist to relieve the tics in my face that set in from all the wincing.
The film wants so bad to be The Naked Gun 2½ not even The Naked Gun not even Airplane! that it casts Leslie Nielsen in a renamed version of his Frank Drebin character (all dialogue and mannerisms are identical), and has a Pavarotti lookalike in tow as part of the "crazy" antics. The lookalikes don't stop there, though there's also a Bill Clinton lookalike (in a lead role) and lookalikes of Madonna, the Pope, George Bush I, Prince (?), Hillary Clinton, and Hollywood Hogan. Keep in mind, this film was made in 2001. Were any of these people really top-of-mind? Not to mention that none of them is their 2001 incarnation, either. Prince (who looks much more like jail-era Rick James) is in his typical 1984 threads, Madonna is in her pointy-boob-Gautier era (circa '90), the Pope is sprightly as he probably hasn't been since like 1956, and Hillary Clinton is more along the lines of 2025. The plot entails Nielsen going to a moon colony where aliens have cloned Bill Clinton with the intent of planting him in the White House and taking over the world. Again, this film was made in 2001. The filmmakers try to pack in the "off-the-wall" humor and "irreverent" style of the Zucker Brothers, plus the "no-holds-barred" attitude of the Farrelly Brothers and/or "South Park," with a strong dose of the "classic wackiness" of Mel Brooks's late-80s period. The result is an absolute mess, its jokes being either thoroughly obvious several minutes in advance or nonsensical to the point where you actually can't figure out what the joke is even supposed to be. There's a very long sequence in which the villain's toupée is removed and thrown about the room in many "hilarious" ways, a running gag hinging on an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, and a climax wherein Bill Clinton and his clone have a saxophone duel. It is my greatest hope that no one involved with the film, especially the director and writer, be allowed to make another one. Their sensibility is so perfectly clueless that you wonder who greenlighted this piece of shit in the first place. The only people I can imagine enjoying it would be those autistic kids who love "comedy" but don't understand it intellectually or emotionally. I'm normally loathe to depart from our standard rating scale, but this is a very needed exception. I hereby award a rating even more unplesant than Blowing Shit—the Distended, Blown-Out Asshole.
Review by La Fée |