[yasr_overall_rating]
A look at the life of an aging insult comic named Jack Burke.
Jackie (Robert De Niro) is a comic icon, attempting to reinvent himself despite his audience only wanting to know him as a television character he played early on in his career. After accosting an audience member and serving a 30 day prison sentence, Jackie is given community service where he meets Harmony (Leslie Mann). Through a series of candid YouTube videos, catching Jackie being – as Billy Crystal’s character puts it – a schmuck, Jackie’s public popularity skyrockets. Sadly, neither the script, storyline, nor character development of anyone, ever takes off.
With so much star potential in this film, I was truly excited about an evening of laughs with a possible light-hearted romance. Neither happened. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I rode the train to the theater and was locked into the train schedule for my return home, I would not have stayed to the end of the film.
There are small funny moments, but most of what should be funny is so riddled with such absolute flat, fizzled-out, overused material, that it’s hard to even crack a smile, let alone find a laugh. There are so many underdeveloped scenes, that I was constantly left with the feeling of wanting to know what was left on the cutting room floor.
I understand that it’s the story of a has-been comedian, trying to work his way out of his TV stereotype and back into the limelight…but there’s supposed to be a reason and talent behind his character deserving a chance. De Niro’s character is never truly anything. He’s never completely funny, caring, tender, or really very three dimensional at all. None of the characters are. Yet they’re also not 2-D enough to be funny or stereotypical either.
I found myself starving to death for something to nosh on, to maybe find out who these people were. What made them tick. I wanted meat and potatoes and got cheese and crackers instead. And I mean that in the worst possible sense of the phrase.
In the many scenes between Jackie and Harmony, where there should have been a building relationship, there never is. In their first meeting at the soup kitchen where they are both doing community service, the scenario is set up to build their May/December relationship on humor and a common view of life, but it never really happens because we never get a look at what makes them who they are. I never care about what happens to their love affair. Even when Jackie meets back up with Harmony in Florida, there is not enough known about them to fill in the gaps of why they are even talking to each other again.
Not caring about much of anything, I believe, is the biggest downfall of this movie. More so than the humor not being to my fancy – that’s a matter of very individual taste – there’s never anything that happens to make me care about anyone or anything that transpires. Not even when Jackie’s career makes a comeback does it make anything better about the film.
With such amazing star-studded talent in this film, it is a great heartache that it falls so very flat. The incredibly talented and naturally comedic Patti LuPone and Danny DeVito as Jackie’s brother and sister-in-law, have nothing in their dialogue or backstory to help pull this wet rag of an attempted comedy out of the wringer. My advice is to skip this movie in the theaters, Netflix, Hulu, Redbox, an in-flight movie, or anywhere else you might see the title. It’s that bad.
In theaters Friday, February 3rd
