A Dissatisfied Customer Does Not Recommend That You WALK HARD!

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I keep waiting for the inevitable Judd Apatow backlash to begin. Will it happen on WALK HARD? Will it happen on FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL? I think PINEAPPLE EXPRESS sounds like it’ll do just fine for itself. But one of these movies is going to get the shit kicked out of it just because Apatow’s had such a hot streak lately. I like the trailer for this one, and I’m looking forward to seeing it as soon as possible, but a review like this one reminds me that, as always, I should set my expectations low and then hope to be surprised.

This is Mullah Omar. After years of lurking at AICN and several months of posting in Talkbacks, I’m happy to actually have something to contribute – meager and obvious as it may be… I was at the 7pm preview screening of WALK HARD off Times Square in NYC on November 1. Before the film, we were told by one of the managers that this was NOT the completely finished film, but aside from some minor editing issues and a few half-done special effects – and a few gratuitous shots of schlongs that will probably be relegated to the unrated DVD version – it looked like a finished film. Straight to the point – WALK HARD was a boring movie. It was not awful, and nowhere near good, but just bland and forgettable. I think John C. Reilly is an okay actor, and he’s definitely one of the better guys they could have found to play a musician in a film (I liked his musical role in A PRARIE HOME COMPANION), but he can’t save this failure. I did virtually no research on this film prior to seeing it, but one headline I saw compared it to AIRPLANE – which is just inaccurate and baffling. At least one major factor (out of many) shoots the analogy down – the question of whether it was essential to see the source material of the parodied subject prior to seeing the parody film. With AIRPLANE, the main subject of parody was the airplane disaster film of the 1950s-1970s – especially ZERO HOUR, AIRPORT 1975, and other plane disaster dramas. Now honestly, how many of us ever saw ANY plane-themed disaster film prior to seeing AIRPLANE? How many of us loved AIRPLANE anyway? I count myself among those who grew up watching AIRPLANE without seeing the source material that it was mocking. And despite that fact, I have always loved AIRPLANE. It has so much happening in every shot, and all of it is so absurd, that it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen another movie in your life – it's a shotgun blast of comedy, and what is happening is so weird that it’s entertaining. The same could be said for HOT SHOTS, TOP SECRET!, THE NAKED GUN, AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, or KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE. Unfortunately, the same cannot really be said for WALK HARD. In this case, the primary source material appears to be WALK THE LINE, and Reilly’s story mirrors Johnny Cash (with a few doses of Bob Dylan, Jim Morrision, Brian Wilson aka Geico Caveman, and others). There is a lot in those time periods and using those influences that could add up to a lot of ambient laughs, but unfortunately, there is rarely anything inherently weird or funny happening at any given time in WALK HARD, and its humor seems to depend its references to other material. While I have not seen WALK THE LINE, I know much of the story of Johnny Cash and the early days of rock n’ roll. There are a few specifics that I didn’t know that I can now confidently guess based on the fact that the jokes were worn-out in WALK HARD. For example, I can guess that at some point in WALK THE LINE, Johnny Cash broke a sink, because the joke is repeated maybe a half-dozen times in WALK HARD, the final instance being a marathon attack of 6 sinks in a row. I suppose it might be entertaining if you just saw WALK THE LINE, but I thought it was tedious. In fact, the first half of the film is pretty tedious. Rather than a flood of jokes, there is the merest trickle. The best section of WALK HARD – and to me, the only part I would recommend that anyone watches – happens after the title shows that it’s 1966. Mocking an interview that could be lifted straight from DON’T LOOK BACK, the film directly calls out Bob Dylan from about 1963-1966, a time when he was making protest music and eventually went into full surrealist gear. It’s funny stuff, partially because it perfectly captures Dylan’s elusiveness, partially because it seems so creatively ad-libbed. The song parodies from this era are excellent – one is a protest song calling for midget rights, the other is a whacked out Dylan fever dream to the nth degree. (The other good song parody is a double-entendre-laden number between Reilly and his Roseanne Cash stand-in soon after they meet.) However, this otherwise pretty-good section of the film quickly devolves into an extended parody of the Beatles’ trip to India in 1968 (featuring a cameo by Jack Black as Paul McCartney and some pretty awful English accents all around). Reilly at this point turned into an observer while the Beatles sparred with one another. I smiled through this stuff, but I couldn’t help but think that not only is this an easy time period to satirize, but it’s been done better elsewhere. To be honest, the actual history of this time is probably more entertaining than what made it into WALK HARD. Also entertaining was the cleavage on Jenna Fischer (as the Roseanne Cash stand-in). There is plenty of nudity in the earlier half of this film, but unfortunately it does not involve her. At any rate, I’m alternately pleased and sorry to say that Jenna Fischer’s cleavage was one of the few highlights of the screening. As I mentioned before, this film appeared to be mostly-finished from a technical standpoint, and clocked in somewhere near 100 minutes. There were some obvious editing issues – when Reilly played catch with his son late in the film, the lines were obviously overdubbed while he stood there with his mouth closed. Editing also seemed to be an issue with the ending sequence – it appeared to be in a bit of flux, with some abrupt cuts and leaden jokes that should be trimmed out because they elicited more groans than laughs. There were also some unfinished special effects – the “force ghosts” that appeared at the end of the film looked complete, but Reilly’s ghostly brother (who appeared throughout the film) and a few of the kids during the catch game towards the end seemed airbrushed into the frames. Otherwise, this film appeared to be technically fine. Something that the censors probably won’t find to be fine is the recurring joke of casually inserting the roadie’s package into the frame every now and then. It happened 3 times that I remember, and it got some of the biggest audience reaction (and not exactly positive – people next to me were looking away whenever it happened). I guess this is a “treat” for the future owners of the “unrated” DVD. Something that happens when I go to a poor movie is that I recall better forms of entertainment, and WALK HARD was inspirational in this regard. My advice if you are interested in the subject matter and would like to be genuinely entertained is to check out Nick Tosches’ book UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK N’ ROLL, a fairly slim volume which weaves webs of hilarity and drama out of (mostly) unknown figures at the dawn of pre-Elvis rock. It’s been years since I read that, but I remember laughing a lot while reading those stories. I cannot say the same for WALK HARD, a pedestrian piece of movie-making that barely merits direct-to-DVD treatment. When the film was over, several of the audience members quietly groaned while others quickly got up and left; there was no applause and I heard nothing in the way of positive comments from anyone leaving the theater. As I walked out of the theater, a woman speaking to a friend of hers said “The best part of that movie was the songs, but I don’t think that was really the point.” I imagine a lot of viewers walked out with the same impression. Bottom line – WALK HARD is a boring film and I recommend it to no one.