Rod’s low point, when he destroys both a projector and the projectionist’s car and has to give up the money he raised to pay for Frank’s heart surgery, only lasts for a few minutes before another solution presents itself. There is zero stress in the film, making it a solid escapist haven. Hot Rod is frenetic, unchecked silliness, and there’s something about that silliness that grounds me when I’m feeling like shit. (Well, except for Will Arnett’s gloriously dickish Jonathan.) They’re just a bunch of goofballs playing in their neighborhood, and I love them all so much that I legitimately get sad every time the end credits start rolling. It’s not mean-spirited, and the characters, though over-the-top, aren’t assholes. It doesn’t punch down, or really even punch up. That’s part of the reason why Hot Rod is a movie I keep going back to – its comedy doesn’t target anyone. Rod, Kevin, Dave (Hader), and Rico (McBride) are buffoons, but earnestly so – you could replace the entire cast with actual teenagers without having to change a single word of the script. To everyone in the film, there’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about a group of friends in their late 20s living like teenagers on extended summer vacation. Nobody really reacts to the fact that Rod and his friends are essentially 13-year-olds trapped in adult bodies. But the movie doesn’t dwell on that – Hot Rod isn’t Step Brothers, in which the butt of the joke is the idea that two grown men are behaving like spoiled children. He lives at home with his brother Kevin ( Jorma Taccone), his mother ( Sissy Spacek) and his overbearing stepfather Frank (a brilliantly grizzled Ian McShane). Samberg stars as Rod, an amateur stuntman stuck in perpetual adolescence. In other words, I’ve probably watched it four or five times over the past two months.ĭirected by Samberg’s Lonely Island partner Akiva Schaffer, Hot Rod is a spoof of 1980s extreme sports movies that also manages to simultaneously take place in the 1980s and the early 2000s. It’s my comfort movie, the cinematic equivalent of a sack of Oreos that I reach for any time I start to feel overwhelmingly anxious or depressed. Interestingly, Hot Rod is also the only one of those movies that isn’t horribly dated, and it’s the only one that I regularly rewatch. 2007 was a year of blockbuster chuckles, but unlike the aforementioned Judd Apatow productions, Hot Rod was not a hit. It was a crowded summer for comedies - Knocked Up was released in June to glowing reviews and incredible box office returns, and Superbadcame out within weeks of Hot Rod that August ( Superbad also features Hader in a supporting role and McBride in a brief background cameo). (Incidentally, Dick in a Box won an Emmy that year, which is absolutely wild to think about.) To be honest, when I went to see Hot Rod I was more excited to see Bill Hader in a movie it wasn’t until later that I became a Lonely Island fan and came to appreciate the chaotic majesty of Danny McBride’s performance. I only knew Andy Samberg from the Dick in a Box sketch that went viral the year before, and I didn’t know anything about his work with The Lonely Island. And of course, a memorable villainous turn from Will Arnett.Hot Rodexploded into movie theaters in the summer of 2007, a halcyon year in which Spider-Man killed Topher Grace with loud noises and Transformersappeared to ruin movies forever. The comedy is a brash mix of slapstick and surrealism juvenile humour and irreverent musical interludes. His means of doing this? Clearing 15 school buses on his dirt-bike. The plot revolves around the hapless Kimble, who dreams of being a stuntman and attempts to raise $50,000 for Frank’s medical bills. Ten years on it is heralded as one of those belatedly popular oddities. Thanks to TV broadcasts and the subsequent pop culture success of star Samberg, Hot Rod has enjoyed something of a rebirth. “Poor certainly describes the quality of the filmmaking,” raged A.O. The star hit back at criticism of the movie at the time: “They were cruel, but they occasionally do that, they pick some comedy and decide to just go to town on it.”Īnd the critics were damning. Then there’s veteran British actor McShane as disapproving patriarch Frank, who delivers scene-stealing turns.
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