Saving Silverman Review
by "JONATHAN RICHARDS" (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)February 18th, 2001
SAVING SILVERMAN
Directed by Dennis Dugan
Screenplay by Hank Nelsen & Greg DePaul
UA South PG-13 100 min.
If you are the right fit for this movie, there's a good chance you're not reading this review anyway, so I'll keep it short.
Wayne (Steve Zahn), J.D. (Jack Black), and Darren (Jason Biggs) are best friends, and mindless idiots. When Darren Silverman, marginally the brightest of the three, falls for Judith (Amanda Peet), a beautiful but heartless bitch, it's curtains for a friendship that has endured since elementary school. She forbids him to see his loutish friends and to play in their band, Diamonds in the Rough (an homage to Neil Diamond). That's the last straw. Wayne and J.D. kidnap Judith, keep her chained in their basement, and fake her death. Meanwhile they try to rekindle the romance between Darren and his old high school flame (Amanda Detmer), who is about to become a nun.
It's not that Saving Silverman isn't funny. It has some laugh-out-loud jokes, verbal and visual. The trouble is, none of them come in the last hour and a half or so. Or maybe we're just so numbed by reel upon reel of gross-out humor, inanity, and misogyny, that we are no longer in a condition to recognize anything funny as things roll toward a climax. The audience I saw it with tried, but its heart wasn't in it.
These men behaving badly are presented as good-hearted but disastrously witless and nerdy louts. It's curious, then, that their idol, Neil Diamond, agreed to appear as a deus ex machina at the end. The movie seems to be saying that these guys are tasteless jerks, and the fact that their taste runs to his music would seem an indictment of it. I myself am not a Neil Diamond fan, so I assumed that was part of the joke, till he showed up. Maybe no one let him in on the gag. --
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
