A Night at the Roxbury Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT cablehouse DOT dyn DOT ml DOT org)October 22nd, 1998
A Night At The Roxbury (1998)
*
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright by Serdar Yegulalp
Look no further than A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY for evidence of the decline of two institutions: "Saturdy Night Live", which hasn't managed to be funny in over a decade and a half, and American comedies in general. ROXBURY is so wan, so thin and juiceless, that it barely classifies as a movie. It also commits the cardinal comic sin: it's not funny.
ROXBURY gives us the Butabi brothers, Steve and Doug (Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan), who are in themselves clones of an earlier SNL routine, the "Wild and Crazy Guys". The post-high-school Butabis are still stuck in their parents' house, work for dad's flower shop, and head out when the sun goes down in futile attempts to get into upscale nightclubs and score with the ladies. After countless rejections (in a movie like this, anything that happens so much as twice feels "countless"), they get lucky and wind up weaselling their way into the ultrahip Roxbury as part of the entourage of a TV star (Richard Grieco). All along the way we get a barrage of hit-and-miss gags -- the best of which have already been played to death in the trailer.
It's a little distressing how the movie manages to play host to many different pieces of action without making any of them funny, or even interesting. F'rinstance, Father Butabi (Dan Hedaya, they guy who looks like Harry Dean Stanton's weaselly brother) and Mom (Loni Anderson, of all people), are barely milked for a single joke. Their function is to stand there and look bewildered. A neighboring businessman's daughter, Emily (Molly Shannon), gets a mad crush on Steve -- as part of a larger plan to manipulate them into mergingin their businesses as well as their bodies -- but they dimness of the boys is so absolute that we hardly care they're being suckered. What fun is that?
Lacking a story, or even a real moment of comic invention, the ROXBURY creators threw everything else they could think of at the screen, and hoped some of it would stick. Fights, weddings, Wayne-and-Garth antics, and on and on. For some reason I was reminded of the equally lamentable TOMMY BOY, which featured SNL alumns Chris Farley and David Spade, landlocked in a script that was equally barren of entertainment, and equally overstuffed with things to attract, but not keep, our attention,
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