Movie Review: The Comebacks (2007)

That’s it. I can’t stand it anymore. The Comebacks is the final straw that broke this camel’s back. I am now officially decreeing that the era of the parody movie is over. It is dead. All remaining screenplays are to be set afire and their ashes shall be dumped in six indiscriminate locations. Any individual or entity entertaining the idea of resurrecting said genre shall be neutered with a rusty butter knife — without the benefit of anesthesia.

Never in my life have I seen such a half-assed attempt at a comedy. I thought Epic Movie and Date Movie were bad, but The Comebacks takes bad to level previously unknown to mankind.

The reason this is so horrid is simple. The writers of this screenplay (Ed Yeager and Joey Gutierrez) were completely out of their league. Writing a few episodes for shit shows like Still Standing, does not equal success on the big screen – hell, 99.9% of the time it spells doom. What made a studio executive think that these guys were going to be one of the .1% is beyond my 5th grade level of comprehension. I’d love to have been in the room for the final screening of this, because I can imagine a room full of the scowls, quizzical looks and profanity as the credits rolled (of course I could be wrong since Fox bankrolled the last two parody monstrosities too).

I fully suspect that portions of the movie were rewritten though, in an attempt to raise the humor level to something that can be construed as passable. Tom Brady (the director), after his flogging, must have realized that haphazardly lampooning sports movies like Radio, Lucas, Invincible, Rocky and Stick It (among others) just wasn’t cutting it. But someone should have told him that adding C and D-List celebrities to a shitty movie does not make it less shitty. It actually muddies the toilet water further. Seeing Andy Dick, Frank Caliendo, Dax Shepard, Will Arnett, Drew Lachey and Stacey Keibler (who looks absolutely fantastic) pop in for cameos, just had me shaking my head at their lack of shame. Anyone with an ounce of pride would have shredded the screenplay when it was handed to them and would have then fired their agents shortly thereafter. By the way, this goes for the stars of The Comebacks too – shame on you Carl Weathers!

On the bright side though, if you ever wanted to see how bad a movie can be, then The Comebacks is for you. It has it all – a terrible premise, terrible writing, terrible directing and terrible acting. It has officially made my list of all-time worst films ever made and is in virtual tie with Feel the Noise for the absolute worst movie of 2007.