Rotten Tomatoes score: 21%
It's time to talk about a part of our history that a lot of people prefer to forget. That's right, I'm talking about the brief window in time when millions of Americans repeatedly gave away their hard-earned money in exchange for tickets to Pauly Shore movies.
It's incomprehensible today, and a lot of people were scratching their heads even at the time, but there's no wishing it away. The fact is, this man appeared in movie after movie, and people drove themselves to the theater, bought tickets, and then sat there and looked at the screen for 90 minutes. Encino Man, Jury Duty, In the Army Now (which brought together the first-rate comedy duo of Pauly Shore and Andy Dick)—and then the world woke up, rubbing its eyes like a hungover partygoer realizing what an embarrassing mistake it had made.
Or, as Wikipedia discreetly puts it, "Shore's acting career has declined since the late 1990s."
But all of that is easy for me to say. I was just a little bit too young to jump on the Weasel bandwagon when these movies first came out. I thought Encino Man sounded like a superhero, and the trailer for Son in Law vaguely disquieted me. By the time I was old enough to watch Pauly Shore movies, they had stopped making Pauly Shore movies. I guess I dodged a bullet.
So it's not entirely without surprise and humility that I report that I sort of enjoyed this movie. It's not great, but it's nowhere near as bad as I had been led to expect.
Its greatest strength is Carla Gugino, who plays the real main character, Becky, a bright-eyed valedictorian who leaves her rural South Dakota hometown for the big city when she enrolls in the University of Something or Other in Southern California. Her parents (including the late, underrated Lane Smith as the dad) drive her to L.A., where they are aghast at the freewheeling lifestyle that prevails on campus: bongs, hot pink hairdos, and girls making out with each other are all too much for their small-town sensibilities.
Most shocking of all is Pauly Shore as the resident advisor in Becky's dorm. Crawl (that's his name) is a stoner on the ten-year plan who loves college life so much he changes his major every few weeks. Yet, beneath his scraggly-haired, spandex-clad exterior beats the heart of a... total weirdo. But he's the kind of weirdo who's up for anything and everything and hasn't got a judgmental bone in his body.
So, slowly but surely, Crawl teaches the shy, insecure Becky how to hang loose. She dyes her hair orange, gets a new wardrobe, and starts using the word "buuud-dy". Then, when Thanksgiving rolls around, she returns the favor by inviting Crawl to spend the week with her family.
Crawl is instantly stoked on Becky's cartoon Old McDonald homestead, but her family is not so thrilled with him. This is realistic, because just imagine how your family would react if Pauly Shore came to spend Thanksgiving with you. He spends roughly the second act being actively irritating while Becky's high school boyfriend Travis tries to rekindle their romance.
But Becky has grown up a lot over the past three months, and she doesn't know if she really wants to spend her life with this unlikable jerk whose only purpose in life is to be the designated disfavored romantic rival. (I'm talking about the boyfriend, not Pauly Shore. This guy is less likable than Pauly Shore.) So when she senses that Travis is about to pop the question during a family dinner at the local honky-tonk, she begs Crawl to interrupt him. Unfortunately for everyone, Crawl's only solution is to claim that he and Becky are already engaged.
Now that we know why the movie is called Son in Law, it takes a mostly predictable course. The family is horrified at first, but Crawl gradually wins them over by being slightly less irritating. Meanwhile, Travis plots to win Becky back by enlisting Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, who I guess is his new sort-of girlfriend or something, to tempt Crawl away. But when that doesn't work, Travis and a family farmhand drug Crawl and Tiffani-Amber and leave them asleep in a barn, to fool them into thinking they have slept together while in a drunken stupor.
Yikes.
Once Tiffani-Amber uncovers Travis' extremely disturbing scheme, Crawl resolves the situation by kung-fu kicking him. Now that the family fully accepts their fake relationship, Becky and Crawl tell everyone that they won't be getting married just yet, leaving us to assume they're going to start a real relationship at some future time.
I had a lot of unkind things to say about Pauly Shore at the beginning of this review, and let's face it, he's an easy target. But he had some redeeming qualities. (I mean has, I guess. Pauly Shore is not dead.) His Stoney character from Encino Man had a childlike innocence about his obnoxiousness, and even here, he occasionally lets us see that his character is a basically nice guy. He's an oddball who just wants to be himself and wants you to be yourself, too.
The slacker with a heart of gold is an effective character type when it's done well, as it was in Bill and Ted. Just imagine either one of those guys in this part, and you can see what might have been. And both Lane Smith and, most of all, Carla Gugino turn in competent performances. I have no idea what they were thinking with Travis's felony-overkill revenge prank, but overall, it's a movie.
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