Big Bully

Steve Miner, 1996
Rotten Tomatoes score: 0%

This is a rare accomplishment, a theatrically released major-studio motion picture that has a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I knew before I watched it that it was a flop, but I wasn't aware it was quite that universally despised. For the first four fifths of the movie, I would have been surprised by that, but the ending is so awful that it's hard to disagree with the critics. Not to mention the audience—this movie only earned back 13% of its modest budget at the box office.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll come back to the rating after I discuss the plot in excessive detail.

Rick Moranis plays David Leary, a published but seemingly unsuccessful novelist who grew up as a bullied youngster in a small midwestern town. His tormentor was Ross Bigger, one of those big, mean, superhumanly strong fat kids who seemed to be lurking around every corner in the early 70s. David eventually got his comeuppance against Ross by ratting him out for stealing a moon rock from a museum. David's family then moved to California while Ross did time in reform school and grew up to be a meek, depressive loser.

Many years later, David receives a letter from his old middle-school principal, who for no logical reason offers him a job as an English teacher back in Minnesota, so David and his troublemaking son pack up and move back east.

For a few mindless scenes, David integrates himself back into his old social circle—every other person he knew as a kid has never left town, and they're all still friends—but things begin to go bad when Ross, who now works for peanuts as the school shop teacher, recognizes the old nemesis who sent him to the big house and plots revenge. His revenge really just amounts to playing some childish pranks and trying to prevent David from getting back together with his old sweetheart Victoria.

But Ross is so excited to have his archenemy back that he undergoes a major personality change, becoming a big bully in all walks of his life. He lays down the law with his misbehaving kids and spices up his marriage by throwing his TV set into a lake (which his wife Carol Kane finds very attractive for some reason). He even imposes order on the delinquents in his shop class by threatening to murder one of them. David's fear of Ross causes him to behave increasingly strangely, which leads Principal Don Knotts to threaten to fire him if he doesn't get his act together. So David decides to have a heart-to-heart conversation with Ross, where he confesses that he was the one who dropped the dime on the moon-rock caper all those years ago.

But wait, you may say. If Ross didn't know that David was the one who snitched on him, why did he want revenge to begin with? I have no idea, but now that he knows, he and David get into a fight to the death in the shop room. Their brawl spills out of the school and into the nearby woods where they used to fight as kids. They have a final dramatic confrontation that results in Ross falling to his apparent death into a river.

David plans to turn himself in to the police for manslaughter, but first he confesses to an old friend who promises to help him cover up the evidence. At home, David speaks to his wacky neighbor Jeffrey Tambor, who somehow knows exactly what David has done and confesses that he too has occasionally contemplated homicide. This scene is so absurd that I was almost certain it would turn out to be a dream. But it isn't. Instead, Ross returns from the woods completely unharmed, and he and David momentarily resume fighting before abruptly deciding to bury the hatchet.

In the next and final scene, David and his son are moving away from Minnesota to New York, where Victoria (the love interest who played a completely insignificant role in the film and was last seen rejecting David because of his paranoid behavior) promises to join them soon. Little do they realize, Ross and his family have decided to move to New York too, so they can be best buddies forever.

And that is the end of the movie.

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I have a hard time calling this one as either underrated or not. At no point is it a good movie, but for the first two and a half acts it's no better or worse than any other randomly selected goofy family comedy from its time. But as soon as David and Big Bully start fighting each other, it swerves wildly off course and becomes a surreal, subversive dark comedy. And then in the last five minutes it just collapses completely.

The basic premise here of a misfit kid who grows up and is suddenly reunited with his childhood bully has obvious potential for a comedy. It could work well as a kids' movie or as a dark comedy, but instead they sort of split the difference, and the result is weird and jarring. I can't recommend it, but I guess I can recommend watching the first 70 minutes or so and then turning it off. Anyway, it's bad, but I'm still impressed that not a single person gave it a good review.