BUCKY LARSON: BORN TO BE A STAR
Directed by: Tom Brady
Written by: Adam Sandler, Allen Covert, Nick Swardson
Starring: Nick Swardson, Christina Ricci, Don Johnson, Stephen Dorff
IT’S BAD.
Oh hell, are you really expecting more here? Fine. BUCKY LARSON: BORN TO BE A STAR is a shit movie with a shit script, shit acting and shit directing. If the ever-so-smug animation heralding it as a Happy Madison Production at the beginning of the film didn’t immediately tip us off as to who exactly we should blame for it, I could very well have gone through the entire movie wondering why I had been commissioned to pay $13 to watch and subsequently review German Scheiße porn.
Bucky Larson stars Nick “No seriously how does this man have a career?” Swardson as the eponymous Bucky, an overbearingly simplistic 30-something year-old man with whose buck teeth and Dorothy Hammil-y haircut make him look like Spongebob’s lesbian sister. After losing his job, Bucky finds out his parents were actually huge pornstars in the 70’s and immediately decides that he needs to do porn now. That is the entire driving force behind the movie: Passionless nepotism.
Along the way, we meet the standard trope of Sandlerian stock characters to round out the film including an aspiring five-star waitress (Christina Ricci, a charming actress who must have pissed in someone’s cereal to get saddled with this insipid movie), the drug-addicted director who serves as the closest approximation of a mentor this crap can muster (Don Johnson) and the blonde-haired, tanned, douchebag rival (Stephen Dorff). I can’t remember any of their names or lines, mostly because I watched most of the movie with my forehead rest firmly in my palm as I seriously wondered where my life went wrong.
Look, I know asking for depth in any movie Adam Sandler is responsible for is like parking a chair on the beach and then yelling at the tides to stop changing, but if Bucky Larson were anymore two dimensional, woodland creatures would start talking. It’s bad enough that there’s no real motivation to the narrative, which means everything that happens in the plot is basically irrational behavior and an audience just can’t properly connect with an aimless protagonist whose sole train of thought is “Well, my parents did it, so why not?” but you would at least figure that a few good jokes or solid lines might redeem this mess, however briefly, right? WRONG.
Sandler has never been known for putting the ‘B’ in subtle, but with Bucky Larson, he sets the bar for comedy so low, denizens of the ninth circle of hell are tripping over it. Porn, as much as I love working in it, is rife with crazy and in capable hands would make for an entertaining if somewhat easy target, but the screenwriters are content to allow the jokes to just hang in front of its audience like a limp dick. If you were to take a shot every time Nick Swardson was marched out onto the screen like a lamb to the slaughter as Sandler pointed at his ridiculous prosthetic teeth and screamed “LAUGH, YOU STUPID SHEEP” you would die of alcohol poisoning midway through the opening credits.
Further extrapolating the process is Swardson’s utter lack of charm or comedic timing. He’s more or less stuck on “relentless optimism” and “hopeless naivety” throughout the entire movie, yet somehow delivers his lines with the comedic punch of a coroner examining the body of a man who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Although I must give props to the woefully cast Ricci, a talented actress who is above this dreck (hell, even Pauly Shore and the gaggle of porn starlets who make cameos in the film are above this) for providing the solitary spark in an otherwise dreary hour and a half, even if her story feels like it was wedged into the plot so that they could pair Swardson with someone of the opposite sex whose role extended beyond “disembodied tits”.
The nail in its coffin, the kick that knocked the stool out from underneath it, the death knell that turned what was already an insufferable movie into one that literally made me feel nauseous through the entire ordeal, was the pedophilic undertones. “But Jeremy!” you say. “Swardson is clearly an adult, as is everyone else in this movie. Surely you’re reading too far into things!”
Well, imaginary devil’s advocate, clearly you’re watching a completely different movie than I, because Swardson was apparently given the go ahead to play his character as if he were an eight-year-old boy. And no, it’s not just the buck-toothed grin, or childish bowl-cut, or the fact that he’s constantly wearing wool sweaters. It’s the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the character of Bucky is stuck in a state of arrested development, having never matured past puberty. Bucky learns about sex literally MINUTES before he decides to go into porn, and his complete lack of experience and knowledge on the subject of sexuality or society in general makes his foray into porn feel less like an adult making an informed decision to become a sex worker and more like a child being thrown to the wolves.
In one of my absolute favorite Patton Oswalt bits, Oswalt talks about how cleaned up, G-rated filth is infinitely more disturbing and uncomfortable than flat-out sexual perversion. In Oswalt’s bit, the humor relies on how he’s aware of the latently creepy nature of it despite the societal okay it receives. But Bucky Larson is completely unaware of this fact, and instead chooses to focus on how hilarious it is that a man who may as well be a toddler can’t keep himself from popping his bottle at the sight of boobs.
But who are we kidding here? You’re a savvy internet reader who can discern proper cinema from outright turds. You already know that it’s going to suck. But Sandler’s built-in audience of Pavlovian laugh-trackers will sit through this celluloid abortion and laugh when given their cues and will make the excuse that it’s “dumb humor” and you just need to “turn your brain off”. Unfortunately, these people have yet to turn their brain on.
If you absolutely must watch a legitimately funny, sex-positive and emotional comedy about porn with relatable characters, rent ZACK & MIRI MAKE A PORNO. If you want to watch a grown man acting like a child being sexualized while Adam Sandler writes the same three jokes over and over for ninety minutes, please go door to door and tell your neighbors that you’re a sex criminal.
0 out of 5
Jeremy Feist is an adult-entertainment model as well as a writer for Xtra Magazine and Popbytes.com. Follow him on Twitter
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