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The Comebacks

The parody genre is in danger. Aside from the Scary Movie series, which have been enormous box office successes and the heyday of Mel Brooks’s films, the genre has dipped in recent years. The Comebacks makes Date Movie and Epic Movie look like pioneers of the genre. This movie was so awful it was sickening. Given the choice, I’d rather watch the dumb, ditzy, uneducated high school girls on The Hills gossiping about who’s dating who and questioning what caviar is, than watch this movie.

The Comebacks is a spoof on past inspirational sports films, such as Invincible, Friday Night Lights, Miracle, Gridiron Gang, and whatever other movie they could put their greasy hands on. This movie, if you could even call it that, follows Lambeau “Coach” Fields (David Koechner), an out-of-luck coach cursed with stupidity and his quest to take a football team full of misfits to the conference championship. Koechner is the dimwit who played Champ Kind in Anchorman, in case you were wondering. His moronic drunken ways prove to translate over into this role where the train wreck that is The Comebacks falls flat on its face. Watching this makes you question whether Koechner is actually funny in his past work.

Facing off against Coach is the brute Carl Weathers as the unbeatable coach. You might ask, “Hey, isn’t that the guy from Rocky?” And I’ll say yes. And then you might say, “I thought Apollo Creed died in Rocky IV and then was reincarnated as Chubs and died again in Happy Gilmore.” Well, my response again would be yes, but in The Comebacks, it’s just his career that died, not his character in the story.

The Comebacks displays nothing remotely effective or clever in its humor. I wasn’t too concerned about the story being unbelievably predictable (after all it’s a spoof), but what was torturous about sitting there was the predictability of the jokes. You could see them coming from a mile away. And then when the joke finally arrives, they drag it on and on for literally minutes too long. And with a 70 minute runtime, you just roll your eyes and think, “I must hate myself to sit through this sh*t.” Sexual euphemisms can be playful and often quite funny. But the constant overuse of them here just adds to the lifelessness. Initially, I thought that maybe the thought of it being so-stupid-it’s-funny would make me laugh, but that was not the case at all.

I am in shock and awe that The Comebacks did not go straight to video. This says something about the movie business these days. Honestly, you have to question how this script was approved, got financed and produced, and ultimately released. It’s a shame that something like this gets made while some potentially great scripts are laying around somewhere. A comedy shouldn’t be this tedious to watch. Someone should tell the people involved in this movie that just making reference to a movie doesn’t constitute a joke.

Written by: John Berkowitz

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