Merrick here...

X-Ray Cat sent in a look at TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY, which is due in theaters November 22.

I’m not a Tenacious D fan, and only sometimes appreciate Jack Black. I know Harry thinks this film is “like having your nipple licked, bit and sucked upon”, but…to me…it looks more like a piercing without anesthesia - every time I see the trailer. And, this is the kind of film I usually embrace with fervor!

All of which means: I’m the wrong person to be commenting on this project. I’ll leave that to X-Ray Cat, whose a TD (not TB) fan.

Here he is…

Hey, it's X-Ray Cat. Tonight I ended many years of wild anticipation andfinally saw TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY. If you're as big a Tenacious D fan as I am, then this is your PHANTOM MENACE.

Alright, it's not that bad. It's an entertaining enough popcorn movie with some great music and some decent laughs, but come on, where's the fucking MAGIC? After so many rewrites, reshoots, and solemn promises from JB and KG that it would be everything we dreamed, it's a bit of a letdown.

The trailer hints that the band's origin story would take them on journeys through fantastic lands with mystical creatures, like SPINAL TAP directed by peak-era Tim Burton, but in fact the striking visuals in the marketing materials are taken from obvious dream sequences and acid trips, in an almost completely humdrum story featuring the two traveling to the Rock & Roll History Museum to find a fabled pick that may or may not have special powers. For a movie about the greatest band in the world, it's just not epic enough.

The bigger surprise is that it's not funny enough either. The joke rate is alarmingly low, and the only ones that pop up either pander to the lowest common denominator (the biggest laughs in the whole crowd came from some
fucking caveman behind me) or feel like a tired rehash of the best jokes from recent, similar comedies. For example, a fairly amusing aforementioned drug sequence features John C. Reilly returning to his Sasquatch role in a magical cartoon world I liked better when it was called Pleasure Town in ANCHORMAN.

The biggest problem is the padded and lackluster script, but many fingers can also be pointed at Jables himself. That's right, not Liam Lynch, who had many fans worried about his fiction feature debut after the undercooked JESUS IS MAGIC, or Kyle Gass, who's never had to carry so much of a movie on his shoulders before. Both of those guys do a fantastic job, actually. No, it's Jack fucking Black, the most experienced of all of them and the key reason Tenacious D became a household name for anyone who gave a damn about comedy. I don't know if he felt he had overexposed his "JB" persona too much in films like HIGH FIDELITY and SCHOOL OF ROCK, where he basically was playing his half of the D to a tee, but he's dropped most of the familiar egotistical eccentricities of his character, and the movie really suffers for it. He says "rawk" 17 times where it should be 37, and "fuck" 22 times where it should be 56.

His performance, and everything else, is scaled far back from the quality of the D's legacy of an amazing TV show, album, and countless live performances, and it's just not the comedy gold that would attract the same cult audience. The dialogue is simple and unquotable, the cameos are wasted, and in general it just didn't make my spine tingle in the way a D movie should. Even when the movie starts to gain steam with a semi-colossal rock-off with the Dark Lord as played by Dave Grohl, it's far too late to make up for lost time, and it still doesn't reach the level of insanity that it suggested itself to reach.

Is my opinion of the movie affected by my level of anticipation? Hell yes it is, but that's all the more reason for me to come here and warn you about it so you calm the fuck down before seeing it in two weeks. You may end up liking it more than I did, but I doubt it's the film you were expecting to see, and BLUES BROTHERS it isn't.

But damn, I can't wait to buy the soundtrack.