Originally, I would not have wanted to watch this flick. They posted the first ten minutes of it online. I watched it and came away bored. How can we think this mock biopic is any good when the last spoof movies, Date Movie and Epic Movie, have killed the genre? Can the current golden boy of comedy, Judd Apatow, continue his run of comic films? The answer is no and no. So, I wonder why I went to see the movie anyway.
Dewey Cox is ably played by Reilly. He makes the perfect clueless singer. The movie's one sheet of him spoofing the iconic Jim Morrison portrait is the best thing from this movie. The songs are fun also.
Walk Hard follows the conventions of the biopic. The early struggles of the young Dewey Cox trying to live up to his dead brother's image and to be a better man than his dad thinks he is. The film moves onto the early career success with a naïve Dewey Cox meeting the King in the film's funniest moment. Rock'N'Roll always included sex and drugs, and it is in finding the drugs to go with the music does the film become a little more funny. Dewey meets The Beatles in India. Jack Black as Paul, Paul Rudd as John, Justin Long as George Harrison, and Jason Shwartzman as Ringo are hilarious. The second best cameo of the film. Jenna Fischer enters the scene after Dewey Cox delivers a cocaine fueled, hardcore version of Walk Hard and promptly adds the sex to the mix. She plays the June Carter Cash role to give Dewey the soulmate he's meant to have. The film then portrays the middling, pathetic side of his fame and it veers off into a bad, boring movie.
I've always though Apatow's movies are 30 minutes too long. He seems to want to put a lot in the films he does. Surprisingly, this film ran about 90 minutes. It still felt too long.
2 of 5 stars.
Indycsh said: