Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Christine Taylor
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. In fact, as I was watching it, I was surprised to realize that bits of the movie had drifted into my vernacular over the years. Any time I hear the world derelict, I want to put the accent on the wrong syllable. Mer-man. Crazy pills. The film has far more sticking power than I would have thought.
Did I Like It: It’s humor still holds up reasonably well, which probably elevates it above many of the other comedies of the era. We may try to forget the movie after the rather odious sequel (a film I couldn’t even bring myself to finish) but giving it another shot is bound to give you some degree of enjoyment. It may not be at the level of some of Stiller’s other, more cerebral work like The Cable Guy (1996) or Severance, but if we judge every film for not having any sort of idea behind it, we probably wouldn’t watch much of anything anymore.
Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my one irretrievable problem with the movie. I’m not going to name any names*, but I was supremely not in any sort of mood to laugh after hearing from the fourth person in the movie to have any dialogue. You’ll know the moment when you see it**. He shows up in all sorts of movies during this era. And I can’t help but wonder if there is truly nothing—from the “On Our Own” music video from Ghostbusters II (1989) to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—that this guy can’t ruin just by showing up. That’s clearly not Stiller’s fault, but one wonders if those odious platforms designed to edit out any sort of adult content from films could actually be re-directed to doing something useful.
*If for no other reason than one does want to avoid getting into an equal time problem…
**If you don’t know the moment, then you may need to re-think large portions of your life.