Almost Heroes Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)June 6th, 1998
ALMOST HEROES
(Warner Bros.)
Starring: Chris Farley, Matthew Perry, Eugene Levy, Kevin Dunn. Screenplay: Mark Nutter & Tom Wolfe & Boyd Hale.
Producer: Denise DiNovi.
Director: Christopher Guest.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult humor)
Running Time: 90 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Ordinarily I pass on unscreened, likely-to-be-lowbrow comedies like ALMOST HEROES, but I felt a certain strange compulsion to check out this one. No, it wasn't out of a desire to pay my respects to the late Chris Farley in his last starring role. Rather, it was morbid curiosity to see whether Christopher Guest, the gifted comic behind films like THIS IS SPINAL TAP (as co-writer and performer) and WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (as director and performer), could sink so low as to direct a truly unwatchable film. And the answer, dear friends, is yes.
To be fair, I'm not sure anyone could have pulled a laugh out of this script with both hands and the Jaws of Life. The story opens in 1804, positing a lesser-known team of explorers crossing the American frontier. Leslie Stevens (Matthew Perry), a foppish sort with visions of heroism, is determined to beat Lewis and Clark charting a route to the Pacific Ocean, and so puts together his own group of adventurous souls. Among them are Bartholomew Hunt (Chris Farley, a slovenly frontier guide, and Guy Fontenot (Eugene Levy), an Indian translator with dubious credentials and an Indian concubine (Lisa Barbuscia). Thus begins a wacky quest West involving Indian attacks, bear attacks, eagle attacks and trouble from an egomaniacal Spanish conquistador (Kevin Dunn).
That's not a horrible premise for some AIRPLANE!-style high-spirited parody, assuming that anyone bothered to bring along a remotely amusing joke. Instead, we get a monotonous, predictable string of knee-slappers which generally involve either excrement, masturbation, premature ejaculation, grievous bodily injury, drunkenness or various permutations of the above. ALMOST HEROES can't even manage to work up the sniggering sophomoric enthusiasm of the Farrelly brothers (DUMB AND DUMBER, KINGPIN) to make the subject matter remotely tolerable, leaving little more than embarrassed performers embarrassing the audience.
The few gags which don't fall into the above categories are based around the two lead characters, each of whom deadens the film further in his own way. Perry has his charms as the prissy Chandler on "Friends," but he can't generate the big personality required to make that act work on the big screen. With someone willing to make grand show of Leslie's fish-out-of-water dandy (perhaps even Guest himself), the role might have been tolerable; without it, it's a comic black hole. That leaves all attention on Farley, who is asked primarily to do what he was asked to do in his other films: fall down a lot and scream. Yet even in his element Farley doesn't seem all there. It's hard not to wonder if his hard-driving lifestyle was already taking its toll on his performance. It's even harder to find any amusement in watching a man who died binging to excess playing a character who binges to excess.
Still, ALMOST HEROES' Grand Prize for Incompetence, simply because it's so unexpected, has to go to Christopher Guest. There's not much raw material to work with in a multi-attributed script, but Guest manages to make choices which crush even the token attempts at humor. In one notable sequence, Leslie makes a chivalrous stand against the conquistador's attempt to steal away the young Indian maiden, saying "Take me instead." The conquistador sizes Leslie up in a variety of coquettish poses, then...Guest cuts away to another scene with Farley before returning several seconds later for the punch line: "No, I still think we'll take the girl." It's a baffling display of wretched comic timing, but nothing more than the rest of ALMOST HEROES deserves. It doesn't even provide a goofy explanation for why our protagonists, despite beating Lewis and Clark to their goal, didn't receive historical credit. Perhaps, like everyone involved in this film, they just wanted to shrink into the background and pretend the whole thing never happened.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 misery trails: 1.
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