Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Harry Lime turned to me during a commercial for this the other day and said, “The only way I’d go see that is if I knew for a fact that Stamp was playing Wilson from THE LIMEY.” Since that’s not the case, there’s no chance of ocular scarring for Mr. Lime. Mr. Foywonder... well... that’s another story. A very sad one.
One weekend where two movies open neither of which were screened ahead of time for critics? Sounds like something right up my alley! However, I was only willing to see one of the two so I flipped a coin. Either way, I lose but it’s a matter of to exactly what degree do I lose.
Well, at about the time late in MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER when Michael Madsen began spraying the living room with a 5-foot stream of urine I suddenly found myself sitting there in the theater wondering if I may have been better off going to see MARCI X.
I’d say I lost big this time out.
I understand that MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER has been sitting on the shelf gathering dust for about 18 months or so. I say it should have stayed on the shelf. In fact, it should have been locked in a safe then the safe should have been put on a ship and taken somewhere out in the middle of the ocean and dumped over the side never to be seen again.
Question. Just how bad must a movie be for a studio exec to finally just say, “Sure, we spent millions of dollars producing it but it’s just so damn unwatchable that there is no chance in Hell that we’re ever going to make a penny of it back. Releasing it won’t do anyone any good?” MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER is every bit as terrible as GIGLI yet isn’t getting nearly the venom in the press. Perhaps if Demi Moore had been cast in the Tera Reid role then maybe critics everywhere would be having a field day with it just as they did with the “Bennifer” fiasco. On the other hand, MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER is just another painfully unfunny comedy and there really is no shortage of those coming out of Hollywood these days. I guess it’s just rare that one comes along that doesn’t star Martin Laurence, Rob Schneider, Chris Kattan, David Spade, or Cuba Gooding Jr. And whatever happened to Yahoo Serious anyway?
As I’m sure you already know, MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER stars current media whore of the moment Ashton Kutcher. Sometime around the beginning of summer Hollywood decided that Ashton Kutcher was an A-list star despite the fact that his actual credits hardly reflect those of an A-list star. I’m still not sure how starring in DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR? and hosting a hidden camera show on MTV gives Hollywood a hard on to cast him as either Superman or Batman or the lead in a variety of other potential blockbusters but apparently it did. Then he started dating a media whore of the past looking to become the comeback media whore of the year and suddenly everywhere you look ASHTONMANIA ™ is running wild. Maybe when he does that Cameron Crowe film he’ll show us all a different side of himself and prove himself to be quite the young thespian. Until that happens, if it happens, I just don’t get ASHTONMANIA ™.
Personally, I see Ashton Kutcher as nothing more than the male equivalent of Jennifer Love Hewitt. They really do have a lot in common. Both got their big break as a member of an ensemble cast on a popular FOX network TV show. Both tend to play sweet-natured characters. Both are capable of pulling off lightweight roles but have no business carrying a movie. Both are really more famous for being “hotties” than for anything of actual substance they’ve done. And both get a ton of press regarding their dating lives. In Ashton Kutcher’s case, it’s his relationship with older woman Demi Moore. In Jennifer Love Hewitt’s case, it seems to be every under-30 male actor in Hollywood. Now that I think about it and I know that I’m really going out on a limb with this one, has anyone ever actually seen Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Love Hewitt in the same room together? Hmm…
Getting back to MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER, I think it speaks volumes about just how awful this movie is (and maybe it says a few things about Ashton Kutcher’s alleged star power as well) that a group of eight teenage girls walked out about halfway into the movie. I thought teenage girls were Kutcher’s target demographic too? Isn’t that why Warner Brothers wanted him for Batman or Superman, to bring in the teen mallrats?
Well, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like walking out with them. Sitting through a laugh-free comedy tends to be the worst type of movie-going experience and MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER is easily in the top 3 of the worst movies I’ve seen in a theater this year. I could have heard a pin drop inside the sparsely crowded theater so I suspect I wasn’t the only one who was wasting precious time that could have been better spent on more constructive ventures like cleaning the septic tank, downloading porn, or posting something hateful in the talkback section.
Here’s your premise. Ashton Kutcher is this good-natured doofus, the kind he always plays as opposed to Seann William Scott who always plays the smug-natured doofus, who has a crush on his boss’s daughter played by actress-turned professional party girl-turned actress again Tera Reid.
Let’s pause there for a moment because I’ve got to say something about Tera Reid. This girl seriously needs an intervention. No, I’m not talking about her hard partying ways that have been the subject of much tabloid fodder. I’m talking about an intervention to keep her away from the tanning salon. At the rate she’s going, Tera Reid is going to turn into that shriveled up old woman from THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY before she’s 35. There’s such a thing as a healthy tan and then there’s having skin the same color as Hulk Hogan’s. She’s orange, people! Ugh! Somebody please get this girl away from the tanning bed.
Awhile back, internet wrestling fans gave Hulk Hogan the rather sarcastic nickname of The Orange Goblin. I think I’m going to start calling Tera Reid “The Orange Harpy.” At least will for the remainder of this review.
Okay, so the good-natured doofus’ boss from hell (Terrance Stamp) is a humorless fascist who fires people at will and basically rules over his company through sheer intimidation. The Orange Harpy asks the good-natured doofus if he’d be willing to come over to the house that night. The good-natured doofus is ecstatic thinking that she finally notices him and wants to spend some time alone with him. What he doesn’t know is that she was being forced to housesit for her father that night unless she found a good-natured doofus to do it for her.
So the good-natured doofus shows up at the boss’s house only to find out that the Orange Harpy has gone to a party with her boyfriend and that he’s been duped into house sitting for Dad while he’s away on a business trip. He’s basically given 3 instructions: feed his pet owl, don’t get dirt on anything, and nobody else is allowed in the house. I bet you can’t guess what happens next?
Anything actually resembling a plot ceases at about this point. In fact, the night before I saw the movie I watched FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD on American Movie Classics and I swear the plot to that movie makes more sense than the series of events that follows in this one. The movie from here on out consists of two things: one wacky situation after another each one more wacky and unfunny than the next and wacky characters each one more wacky and unfunny than the next.
Let’s see. Molly Shannon shows up at the house. She plays the somewhat lowbred secretary who the good-natured doofus inadvertently got fired so now she guilt trips him into letting her stay the night. Soon she’s followed by three more of her ilk including Carmen Electra whose character only seems to exist for two scenes - the wet T-shirt scene and the scene where the good-natured doofus is coerced into giving her a breast exam because she suddenly becomes convinced she has breast cancer. Before any of you get to excited, let me remind you that the movie is PG-13.
Also along with Shannon’s character is the black guy whose sole contribution is being black and having virtually no lines of dialogue and the greasy looking redneck character who provides such comic gems like his conspiracy theory of how JFK was actually assassinated by Desi Arnez Jr. Please, try to control your laughter until the end.
Then comes Andy Richter as the Orange Harpy’s scheming brother “Red” whom dad has a restraining order against. Richter is totally wasted and has virtually nothing to do but at least he gets to bare his naked ass before it’s all said and done so I guess it was all worth it.
Just when it doesn’t seem like it could get any less funny along comes Michael Madsen as a drug dealer’s thug determined to get what his boss is owed from the good-natured doofus’ boss. The highlight for this character being the before mentioned scene of Madsen’s character urinating on everything in the living room. When I got up to get something to drink I missed the scene of the owl snorting cocaine out the toilet but thank God I didn’t miss out on the comic hilarity that is an endless stream of bodily fluids being sprayed everywhere for minutes at a time.
The Orange Harpy returns home having just broken up with her boyfriend and immediately she begins pouring her heart out to the good-natured doofus. What he doesn’t know is that she thinks he’s gay. It’s amazing how this movie adds the whole mistaken for being gay element to the plot from out of nowhere and then goes nowhere with it before blowing it off just as quickly as it introduced it. Then again, this is also the same movie that expects us to believe that the boss’s daughter doesn’t see or hear any of the mass destruction going on downstairs.
But wait, there’s still more wackiness and wacky characters to come. At one point the good-natured doofus gets confused for the blind date of a neighbor’s daughter, who happens to be recovering from some sort of head trauma. This leads to an extremely lame rip-off of the “Massive Head Wound Harry” character Dana Carvey did on Saturday Night Live back in the early 90’s.
Then the Orange Harpy’s ex-boyfriend shows up and it turns out he’s actually a short, fat, neurotic black guy. Oh, the comedy! I tell you the only thing amusing about this character is that they didn’t get Anthony Anderson to play it.
I’m sure I’m leaving out more wacky characters and wacky situations but what’s the point? I think I can pretty much summarize just how incredibly unfunny the movie is by describing one particular scene.
The boss’s owl is named OJ. OJ flies away. Ashton Kutcher runs outside screaming after it. Molly Shannon tells him to calm down. Ashton turns around just as some young blonde-haired women walk by in the background and yells, “How can you expect me to calm down! OJ is on the loose!” The young blondes all scream and run away.
Yeah, nothing beats topical humor. I’m amazed they didn’t work in a Joey Buttafuoco reference. Hell, even a Lewinsky joke would have been timelier. Just as I did with that scene, most of my time was spent sitting there in my seat shaking my head at just how bad it all was and wondering how anyone in their right mind could have thought any of this was worth making.
To top it all off, the movie has the audacity to play the romance between the two leads as a straightforward romance. None of this is played for laughs not that it stood much of a chance of getting any. They have all of about 10 minutes of screen time together but by the end we’re supposed to believe they’re both deeply in love with one another and that she’d be willing to drop everything and rearrange her entire life for this man.
MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER feels like some really awful comedy from the 80s that would have starred C. Thomas Howell or Scott Valentine or maybe even Patrick Dempsey but it has the mentality of a 90’s gross-out comedy. Only thing is MY BOSS’S DAUGHTER would be a flat out, humorless stinker regardless of what decade it came out. It’s inept, unfunny, and an absolute waste of perfectly fine film stock.
I don’t know exactly who deserves the most blame for this one. Whether it’s the screenwriter who wrote such weak material, director David Zucker who clumsily executes one lame gag after another, the actors who often just seem to be reciting lines or doing really amateurish slapstick, or the producers who gave this crap the greenlight; somebody screwed up royally. Hell, I’ll just blame them all. Fortunately for all involved, hardly anyone besides me will ever actually see this movie.
The Foywonder
Thanks, man. I don’t know how you find the stomach for it. Time after time after time.
"Moriarty" out.
