 Review by Mark David Campbell Napoleon Dynamite was one of my favorite movies of this decade. It was just the right amount of quirky, eclectic and funny. I went into Gentlemen Broncos, the latest film from Napoleon director Jared Hess with similar expectations. Damned expectations. I expected a multi-layered comedy. I got one, yes, but unfortunately, both of those layers truly sucked. Michael Angarano (the kid from The book goes on to become a bestseller, which sparks an all-out war between the two. Grounds for truly quirky comedy? Very much so, which makes me all the more disappointed in what I got instead. For you see, Gentlemen Broncos’ sense of realism is amped up so high it bordered on farce, and the dialogue was far too strange to be taken seriously, as it was far too dependent on scatological humor, if you know what I mean. Apart from that, we are also treated to visual depictions of both Michael’s original story and Ronald’s plagiarized version. In those sequences, I was forced to watch Sam Rockwell playing the story’s hero in a series of horrible wigs and speak in even more horrible accents. And obnoxious? Rockwell has pulled that characteristic off before, but here it just seems so ill-timed and unnecessary. About the only positive thing I can say about this film is that Michael Angarano is a young actor that shows a lot of promise for the future. Too bad the rest of the so-called “veteran” cast showed absolutely none. 1 ½ / 5 stars |
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