KINGPIN
A film review by Chad Polenz
Copyright 1997 Chad Polenz
** (out of 4 = fair) 1996, PG-13, 113 minutes [1 hour, 53 minutes] [comedy] starring: Woody Harrelson (Roy Munson), Randy Quaid (Ishmael Boorg), Vanessa Angel (Claudia), Bill Murray (Ernie McCracken), produced by Brad Krevoy, Steve Stabler, Bradley Thomas, written by Barney Fanaro, Mort Nathan, directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly.
"Kingpin" tries to cash in on the elements that worked in the Farrelly brothers' first film, "Dumb And Dumber," this time with the generic sports plot (the underdog versus the champion), and it doesn't work because it goes overboard. The film focuses too much on plot rather than on jokes, and the jokes we get are in questionable taste.
There isn't much to a comedy like this, it recycles every comedy formula: 1) the underdog versus the world, 2) the idiots in the real world, 3) the bombshell, 4) the road trip, 5) the monetary deadline, 6) and the villain.
The film stars Woody Harrelson as Roy Munson, a young bowler from Iowa who attempts to make a career out of hussling bowlers along with the man whom he narrowly defeated, Ernie McCracken (Murray). A lot of cartoony jokes and storylines start to form, such as Munson being too stupid to notice what is going on around him, and Ernie as the typical, wise-cracking antagonist. When Ernie leaves Roy to a mob of angry gamblers, Roy finds himself deprived of his bowling hand and of course his life is shattered.
Fast forward to the present day as Roy is doing whatever he can to make ends meet, even going so far as to sleep with his absolutely disgusting landlady to avoid rent payment. Here the tone of the movie is set - we're going to get a lot of poo-poo jokes that are original, but disgusting at the same time. You laugh but you feel guilty afterward.
One day Roy meets an Amish man named Ishmael (Quaid), who is the talented prodigy with great potential, if only he'd let Roy coach him. And so Roy and Ish start their cross-country journey from Pennsylvania to Reno to the million dollar bowling tournament, because "the bank" has threatened to foreclose on the Amish if they can not come up with $500,000.
>From here on the story goes through the motions and only exists to make for jokes - some funny, others not, which wouldn't be so bad if the pacing was a little faster. We get many jokes about both male and female genitalia, typical cartoony slapstick, and one-liners, but they are all pretty much connected by the fish-out-of-water story. The jokes start to get a little too lowbrow, relying on locker room humor and male fantasy jokes.
Guess how "Kingpin" ends? Actually, one element to it is surprising, but the rest is pretty standard. Yes, this movie does yield some big laughs, but not all big laughs. It concentrates too much on plot and comedy suffers.
please visit Chad'z Movie Page @ http://members.aol.com/ChadPolenz
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews