'Will' power doesn't generate laughs in lame comedy
What does it feel like to watch Will Forte and Will Arnett mug and cutesy-pooh their way through the comically stillborn movie "The Brothers Solomon"?
I'd say it's kinda like raking your eyeballs across sandpaper. With a salt-water flush.
It's easy to criticize movies made by (former or current) cast members of "Saturday Night Live" as five-minute skits painfully padded out to feature length. In some cases, that's actually true.
But not here.
Five minutes would be way too long for a skit where the two Wills struggle to be funny and vulnerable, and wind up merely pathetic.
Yep, you can tell a comedy's in trouble when the funniest in-joke involves overdue charges on a rented "Ulee's Gold" videotape.
Arnett and Forte play the titular Solomon brothers John and Dean, total nerds and doofuses with doctorates, the result of being home-schooled by their widower daddy, played by the former "Six Million Dollar Man" himself, Lee Majors.
He happily spends most of the movie comatose in a hospital bed after suffering a stroke. John and Dean know that Dad really wanted a grandchild, so they decide to impregnate any woman they can find to make comatose Dad's dream come true.
After an obligatory montage of rejections from potential baby makers, John and Dean find Janine (Kristen Wiig), a woman willing to carry their baby for $12,000. If only her emo boyfriend James (Chi McBride, slumming here) would stop crying and moping all the time.
John and Dean supposedly love each other, and their characters should be cute little puppy dogs loyal to their master, or in this case, Dad.
But these characters have no soul or depth. Forte's shallow, sketch-form writing develops neither the plot nor the characters, and not even Naperville native Bob Odenkirk's functional direction can humanize these "Brothers Solomon" into people worth our pity or concern.
Instead of a full feature film, we get a series of tired routines loosely connected. We get the hot tub scene. We get the hospital room scene. We get the sperm bank scene.
Worse than wasting Malin Ackerman's brief turn as a bikini-clad nursing student named Tara, "Brothers Solomon" desecrates a Gen-X musical touchstone when it shamelessly employs John Parr's "St. Elmo's Fire" as an anthem for the stupidest guys to ever earn PhDs.
Credit Majors for grabbing the movie's best role: the unconscious one.
"The Brothers Solomon"
1 star
out of four
Opens today
Starring As
Will Arnett John Solomon
Will Forte Dean Solomon
Chi McBride James
Lee Majors Dad
Written by Will Forte. Produced by Tom Werner and Matt Berenson. Directed by Bob Odenkirk. A TriStar Pictures release. Rated R (language, sexual situations). Running time: 91 minutes.