July27

BMN: You, Me and Dupree

Was I surprised? Well, yes, I was. I didn’t expect a movie that starred Owen Wilson to end up being a Bad Movie Night selection – at least for another couple of years. It’s not just Owen Wilson that I didn’t expect, but it’s the notion that a Frat Pack (hereby referred to as FP) movie was considered so bad that we ended up spending a night viewing and trashing it.

Yet here it was. The release of “You, Me and Dupree,” has marked the first major blemish on the FP’s reputation. Weighing in at a measly 20% on RT made me ask the question, “is the honeymoon already over,” before I even saw the movie.

When viewing the trailers for the movie, I never thought it was going to be comedic gold, but I also didn’t think it was going to be a 20%. Granted, it’s no “Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver,” but can everything the FP does be that way? No, that’s glaringly obvious. But here’s the kicker, when a movie like this makes $21M its first weekend, it’s hard to argue with the results. That said, be ready for more and more movies like this until we can’t shake money from the tree.

So was it a 20%? In my opinion, no, not at all. It didn’t come close to a 50%, but I could see it hovering around the 33% mark – one in three people had to like it. What made it so bad?

Owen Wilson starred as... Owen Wilson... again
As funny and charismatic as a broken-nosed actor can be, how many time do we have to see the same character in movie after movie (that AREN’T sequels)? I feel that Wilson is on the verge of being the next Jeff Goldblum or Helen Hunt. I don’t care how funny or quirky you are, you HAVE to switch it up every now and then.

I’ve seen this story-line before
Flashback a few years to “Meet the Parents” and you’ll notice a very similar plot. Oh, but I guess it’s okay to do that since Wilson and Ben Stiller are friends. Plus, they switched the plot up a whole lot, kinda. It wasn’t the weird, kinda-off, guy meeting the parents, it was the normal guy (with the weird, kinda-off, friend) fighting with the overbearing dad. It’s the same, but different!!!

Nobody cares about Matt Dillon
Should I explain? No? You’re good? Dillon’s bad? Cool.

No ad-libbing?
Something the FP seems extremely well at doing is ad-libbing a majority of their movie. Why waste time scripting something when you can create on the fly. This wasn’t present at all in this film. It felt overly scripted and very forced in parts, and that took away from some of the potential genuineness that comes through in ad-libbing.

The other guys didn’t seem to like the movie like I did. Now I won’t go see the movie again, nor will I rent it went it hits DVD, but it wasn’t a 20%, nor was it a worthy BMN selection – I remember laughing many times. I didn’t take the movie seriously (which no one should if Wilson is involved). I didn’t see what was so bad about the movie, someone please enlighten me.

+ original post date: July 27, 2006 11:56 PM
+ categories: Bad Movie Night