Currently watchable for free on the Roku Channel streaming service. Daniel Radcliffe stars as Weird Al, in a parody of rock biopics.
I've been a Weird Al fan for a long, long time, so I was looking forward to this. It doesn't reach the heights of UHF, but it is okay, in a "Good bits in a mixed bag with very unfunny stuff" kind of way. Radcliffe does an excellent job, but some of the material he's got to work with isn't the best.
A lot of Al's humor is based in taking a thing, and overblowing it to the point where it becomes absurd. Unfortunately, if you fail to make it absurd, it comes off as... cringey and even triggering. The "abusive parent" trope in the film unfortunately reaches realistic levels, not absurd ones, and there's some violence that also stops at brutal, rather than going to the point of being absurd. I was watching with two folks who had bad parents growing up, and one had to look away, and the other had to leave the room.
I've been a Weird Al fan for a long, long time, so I was looking forward to this. It doesn't reach the heights of UHF, but it is okay, in a "Good bits in a mixed bag with very unfunny stuff" kind of way. Radcliffe does an excellent job, but some of the material he's got to work with isn't the best.
A lot of Al's humor is based in taking a thing, and overblowing it to the point where it becomes absurd. Unfortunately, if you fail to make it absurd, it comes off as... cringey and even triggering. The "abusive parent" trope in the film unfortunately reaches realistic levels, not absurd ones, and there's some violence that also stops at brutal, rather than going to the point of being absurd. I was watching with two folks who had bad parents growing up, and one had to look away, and the other had to leave the room.
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