Directed by Saturday Night Live writer and fellow Lonely Island collaborator Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg's willfully doofy film debut, Hot Rod, is a comedy powered by the twin turbines of over-baked emotion and adolescent alienation. Live-at-home amateur stuntman Rod Kimble (Samberg, above) is desperate for the admiration of his gruff stepfather Frank (Ian McShane), who picks on Rod and tosses him around like a rag doll in their weekly sparring sessions. When Frank falls ill, Rod — still believing a physical beatdown is the only way to gain Frank’s respect — concocts a plan: jump 15 buses, raise enough money for Frank’s emergency heart operation, and then... kick his ass.



The two most essential touchstones here are Napoleon Dynamite and Billy Madison, which indulged a similar fondness for hallucinatory asides. Hot Rod applies the former film’s zonked-out petulance and clumsy inelegance to a little-engine-that-could underdog story, while taking the serial silliness of the latter to occasionally dizzying new heights. To the movie’s credit, it cannily overplays its hand in virtually every scene requiring sincere emotion or plot advancement (including a fetishistic recreation of the wooded training sequence in Footloose). Still, the relationships are all phony, since the comedy is discrete and scene-specific, with characters and motivations changing to suit various moments. In essence, this is a comedy destined to play in college dorm rooms over the next couple of years, with plenty of inebriated holler-backs. While often funny, Hot Rod doesn’t quite have the steadying, consistent throughline of a fellow ramshackle comedy like, say, Tommy Boy. Wow, I can’t believe I just typed that...

For my original review text, from CityBeat (from which the above is expanded), click here and scroll down. I'll have more thoughts on the film — including why its taco versus grilled cheese sandwich sequence may be a metaphor for the immigration debate — hopefully later in the day, or possibly early tomorrow.