IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name Theatrical Review of Talladega Nights 2006...

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Now, I really wanted to love this movie, I really did. Hell, after Anchorman pleasantly shocked the hell out of me last year with the sheer raw quality and fury of its goddam bear fight, I had hyped the whole cougar thing in Talladega Nights to literally epic proportions...

The thing is though, while the film definitely did have its moments? Talladega Nights simply did not deliver on all my hopes and dreams. It just wasn't the Will Farrell classic that I think we had all hoped it would be...

To be honest, while I definitely did wear a smile on my face throughout the whole of the Ballad of Ricky Bobby, there were just so few moments where I actually laughed. Hell, I can name pretty much all of them for you now, as they pretty much entirely consist of the single montage of moments where Ricky is refinding his zest for being a Nascar racing driver after his little incident with Girard...

The cougar moment was decent, although the trailer did kind of spoil it. But I certainly laughed my balls off at Ricky Bobby ramming a police officer with a parked truck (sigh... reminds me of my own driving skills), and I certainly still did get a kick out of the poor man trying to feel the road like the force while driving goddam blind-folded. It takes a true master of the martial driving arts to master such abilities, and suffice to say, Ricky Bobby was no better at that shit than I was...

Absolutely the funniest damn moment in the entire film was the knife in the leg in the hospital. Sure, it was spoiled to hell in the movie trailers, but I suppose I truly am trailer park trash to still be so damn entertained by a wuss of a man scremaing his tailpipes out. I mean honestly, what fucking kind of nutjob first wishes paralysis on some poor black man's future children, and then sticks a second knife in his own leg to try to pry out the first one? Simply genius, I tell you, and definitely the only moment in the film that truly reminded me of the bloody hell brilliance behind both Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin...

The thing was though, I expected so much more from a "real man" Will Farrell film. Now sure, he was alright in Talladega Nights, I guess. And some of his improv did have its charm, like the guy admitting that "The Magician" nickname was awesome as hell. But for the most part, like I stated before, there were just so few laugh out loud moments in that Talladega Nights theatre of mine, that I couldn't help but feel disappointed as I walked out that night. I had thought I would at least get a chuckle out of Will Farrell running around in his underwear thinking he was on fire, or of him and his family getting chucked out of an Applebee restaurant (whatever those things may be). But alas, as weird as it is to say, that just wasn't enough to satisfy my Applebee appetite for Will fucking Farrell...

And at least, I expected some sort of decent supporting cast for the guy, yet we got almost nothing from the film. Cal was an alright best friend I guess, with all his nifty catch phrases and his little slingshot drafting maneuver to help out his friend in a jam. But except for his whole "Magician" thing, Cal just didn't really have any classic lines of his own. He was more just there than anything, as the background figure that he always did feel like as a character throughout the whole of the movie. Always the 2nd place bridesmaid, never the bride...

Were we supposed to care about Ricky Bobby's family life either? I mean, it was obvious from the getgo that his wife was a gold digger of a whore, to the point where her seduction of Cal in just under three movie seconds didn't even muster a pint of laughter from me. And sure, some of the lines from Ricky Bobby's children were classic, but I eventually got bored of their act just like Ricky's mother did as well. And as for Lucy herself, she was definitely one of the strongest characters in the film in the way she commanded the screen with her wisdom and charm. It's just that, except for perhaps the birth of Ricky Bobby at the start, did she even have any classic moments or memorable lines? Couldn't she have at least offered to be somebody's sex buddy again, preferably to one of her grandkids?...

Susan had no purpose in the film whatsoever. Hell, I didn't even notice that she was alive until I realized that it wasn't Ricky Bobby's wife with the children, watching the races halfway through the movie. And I don't think I even recognized her name until that one scene on the table, where apparently we're supposed to get seduced by her little splunky horniness to sit Ricky Bobby in her driver's seat. Sure, the bitch was cute (especially with those glasses of hers, my personal fetish and all), but she was just such a shallow character compared to the romantic comedy aspects of both Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin in the past, that even I couldn't get turned on by the goddam petite whore...

And why the fuck did anything happening with Ricky Bobby's father seem to get the real focus of the film? Sure, the combination of the two did produce probably the best laughters of the entire movie (the rebirth of Ricky Bobby after the accident, so to speak), but I really did not give a damn about their actual father and son, shake and bake connection. Yeah, his father is a hick of a drunk and blah blah blah, Ricky Bobby therefore has father abandonment issues. And sure, I snickered when Reese Bobby finally showed up at the Talladega 500, just to pawn off the tickets that Ricky always left for him. But I certainly didn't give a fuck about the actual conflict between the two, while strangely enough, I actually did empathize with Will Farrell's character in past films like Anchorman and even goddam A Night at the Roxbury for Christ's sakes...

Yeah, we got some nice shining moments from both Michael Clarke Duncan and that Jean Girard character in the end, I guess. But considering those were two of the biggest names in the film, I expected so much better than just a car wash, a pit stop, a gas shortage, and that's about it...

I expected the Highlander of films, the one that won an Oscar for Best Movie Evar, you know?...

... well, Talladega Nights wasn't shit or anything, but it was still disappointing and ultimately unsatisfying in the end...

Now Will Farrell is still The Man when it comes to comedy, and I do admit that I damn well enjoyed myself throughout the film for the most part...

But goddammit, with Anchorman and the like? He's just set the bar too damn high for himself. Or simply set too short of a damn world lap record around the Talladega 500, if you will...