Head 2 Head: Fanboys

By Brian Reinhart and Joe Dwyer     2/12/09 6:00pm

Brian's Take:

The most frustrating movies to watch are the bad movies which could have easily been classics.Fanboys has all the makings of a fantastic comedy: a brilliant premise, funny characters, silly situations, a deep and abiding love for geeks and a cameo by William Shatner. So its total failure to generate laughs makes this movie not just bad, but incomprehensible.

The plot is, frankly, hilarious. We are in the year 1998, and four Star Wars fans from Ohio hatch a plan to drive cross-country, break into George Lucas' ranch, and steal the rough cut of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, months before its official release. Along the way the fanboys have many misadventures, including brawls with evil Star Trek fans and a crazy pimp named Roach (Knocked Up's legendary Seth Rogen). In other words, we have a perfect recipe for comic excellence and a glittering parody of the subculture of Star Wars maniacs that lives to this day.

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How did the people making a movie that sounds so promising screw it up so badly?

Let us count the ways.

First, Fanboys takes the usual cast of a young-adult buddy comedy (an assembly of losers and geeks plus the token hilarious fat guy), and it almost immediately distracts us from the laughs which will ensue by telling us that one of characters has cancer and is about to die. Eventually his tragedy drowns the rest of the movie in bittersweet, incredibly cheesy fake pathos.

We then get some badly written speeches by the dying friend (The Girl Next Door's Chris Marquette) about the meaning of friendship, the tragedy of death, and how this whole trip to Skywalker Ranch has really been all about love all along, not about trying to see a movie. And the audience feels cheated: They came to see a farcical, geeky Star Wars comedy and have been ambushed by a phony tragedy.

What's worse, Cancer Boy looks exactly like Joey Fatone, which is maybe a sadder fate than cancer.

The problems continue. Fanboys does not so much tell jokes as bludgeon us with them. At one point, a girl appears at a Halloween party covered in blue tampons and proclaims, "I'm Picasso's blue period!" That is funny enough, but then she decides to explain the joke to everyone. "Blue period. Get it? Period! Ha ha."

Worse, for a movie which allegedly pays homage to Star Wars, the inside jokes are surprisingly shallow. The allusions to the original films are usually corny and obvious, and the questions posed to the fanboys in order to test their Star Wars knowledge are generally at the introductory level. At one point our heroes fall into Lucas' garbage chute and the walls begin closing in, a wonderful tribute to the classic scene in Episode IV, but the resolution is just plain stupid: They discover that the trash compactor has an emergency exit.

Another difficulty with Fanboys is the way in which it uses all the old buddy-comedy clichés. We have seen most of the movie before, have heard most of the jokes before and know all of the characters from movies like Superbad and Sex Drive.

Only the lightsabers and Jedi mind tricks really make this film any different. They certainly do not make it funnier.

We do get some cameos from actors associated with the original Star Wars series, including Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian) and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia). Most memorable is Star Trek star William Shatner's sly appearance as himself, but almost all of his tiny part is shown in the movie's trailer, which ruins the surprise.

In many ways the best and most telling line of Fanboys comes when the buddies are contemplating the prospect of finally seeing The Phantom Menace. One friend turns to the others and asks, "What if the movie sucks?" The joke works for obvious reasons: It is funny, true, clever and dripping with dramatic irony (We know Episode I sucked!). But it is curiously out of place, because there are hardly any other jokes in the film which mine the same deliciously satirical vein of humor.

That line is all the more ironic because it is such an apt description of Fanboys itself. Star Wars fans and Lucas geeks will walk into Fanboys in their storm trooper costumes expecting a joyous homage to the series they love. Instead they should probably be asking themselves, "What if the movie sucks?"

Joe's Take:

Attention men: If you're looking for the perfect way to introduce your girlfriend to the magical universe of Star Wars without her asking too many questions or complaining that she's bored only eight minutes into A New Hope, there may be a solution.

Fanboys landed in theaters last Friday, and while the plot structure is a little thin and overused, there is still something for everyone to enjoy in this flick. Set 11 years ago (yes, it's really been that long since Episode I), the film follows a group of former high school friends who cross paths at a Halloween party and reminisce about the plans they drew up as kids to travel across the country and break into Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. When one of them reveals that he is dying from cancer, they decide to make the long road trip to California to steal a cut of the upcoming film for him to see before he croaks.

During its development, Fanboys faced an extensive rewrite that would have removed the cancer plotline and replaced it with loads of Van Wilder-esque toilet humor. Fortunately, when fans of the film and of Star Wars caught wind of this, they banded together on the Internet and began a campaign to return the film to its original state, a campaign in which they were successful.

Admittedly, the premise may sound stupid, but the film never takes itself any more seriously than it should. Director Kyle Newman (The Hollow) and newcomer writer Ernest Cline clearly had a lot of fun with the subject matter, and it shows: The number of cameos from a galaxy far, far away (Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, Ray Park, William Shatner and even Seth Rogen, who plays multiple characters) is staggering, as is the amount of Star Wars memorabilia crammed into each shot: I was able to spot some of the action figures and playsets that I had as a kid sitting in the background of several scenes. There are enough in-jokes peppered throughout the film to keep the real-life fanboys laughing and plenty of 1998 nostalgia and witty humor to keep the remainder of the audience entertained.

The film rarely throws any curveballs at the audience, so don't expect to have an epiphany while watching the film. For the most part it's just brainless fun and lots of yelling and running, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The cinematography and special effects aren't anything to write home about, but unlike the Star Wars prequels, Fanboys relies on entertaining characters and a halfway-decent story instead of extensive CGI to get the job done.

The cast meshes very well. Even Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), probably just thrown into the film to offset the testosterone levels, plays a believable Star Wars nerd. Dan Fogler (Balls of Fury) plays Hutch, the trash-talking, overweight equivalent of Han Solo. He drives a tricked-out Chevy Econoline with a suitcase full of Rush cassettes under the seat and a huge red button on the dash that controls "lightspeed." Fogler is by far the funniest cast member to watch, but the main reason is because he is the one given all the humorous lines. Socially awkward Windows (Tropic Thunder's Jay Baruchel), terminally-ill Linus (The Girl Next Door's Chris Marquette) and fanboy-turned-car-salesman-turned-fanboy Eric (Jungle 2 Jungle's Sam Huntington) round out the rest of the cast.

At its very core, Fanboys is a celebration of real-life fanboys and their fanatical dedication to things that don't even exist. It's a film by fanboys, about fanboys and made for fanboys, but that's not to say that the uninitiated can't enjoy it and have a good time watching it. Unless they're Trekkies.

Or Brian Reinhart.

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