It's kind of funny, 15 years later, that anybody would think of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story as a movie to be imitated. A flop when it was released, the muscial biopic parody starring John C. Reilly is now a comedy classic, and probably has the longest legs of any film from the Apatow kingmaker era. And for good reason, it is one of those great parodies that has a scorched earth effect on the genre. It was hard for me to watch, say, Elvis without thinking of "You don't want no part of this shit!" or the famous musicians from the era dropping in to give on the nose guidance to our hero. (Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King feels functionally identical to Dewey tripping with Fab Four.).
A couple years later, Funny or Die made a fake trailer for a awards bait Weird Al movie. The trailer, titled Weird: The Al Yankovic Story starred Aaron Paul as Mr. Yankovic and was a pretty funny take, hitting a lot of the same notes you would expect (the father who doesn't believe in his son, the drug & alcohol addled spiral, the showy celebrity casting) and had just enough legs to make one watching think "Hey, that'd be a pretty funny movie." And nine years later, they did that.
The problem with making a movie based on a trailer, however, is it's putting the cart before the horse. If you've ever seen Machete, Robert Rodriguez's excellent grindhouse parody trailer turned to an extremely mediocre movie, it has a similar problem. It has all these funny punchlines that work in a three minute package at a nice speedy clip that it's forced to turn over into a full movie that has to justify all of these out of context moments. It kills the movie's pace before it can even get a leg out the door. Going from Cheech Marin's priest sighing "I'll see what I can do" at Machete's confessional into a jump cut to him pulling two shotguns out of a trunk is hilarious. It's less funny when it's followed by a scene further tying together the character's backstory and getting it's loose plot across the finish line.
Weird, despite the recasting of the main roles, hits all the checkmarks that the trailer does. But like the Machete trailer it ends up feeling a little too faithful to the source material at the expense of the actual movie. Which is ironic, cause if this movie wants one thing it is to be as far flung from the actual life of Weird Al as possible. Daniel Radcliffe (a treasure here and everywhere) plays Weird Al as he experiences his meteoric rise to superstardom, from his humble days as a misunderstood outcast tasting the forbidden fruit of polka despite his disapproving parents (Toby Huss and Julianne Nicholson) to his utter dominance of the music industry at the hands of his talent. (In one of my favorite jokes in the movie, he balks at being a parody artist as he is also able to make his own music, such as his original composition "Eat It", later shamelessly ripped off by Michael Jackson). It follows the expected tragic rise and fall, including a Yokoesque Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) who is only after Al for that sweet CBB Yankovic Bump in record sales and, at one point, a roided up shoot out with Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro).
The movie is often more funny in concept then in execution. The problem is that it lacks specificity outside what is expected. Take Walk Hard, a movie whose main inspiration is the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. But Walk Hard also pulls from the entire history of 20th century pop music, from an extended Brian Wilson riff to 70s variety shows. It has a base that it builds and builds on with as many jokes it can pack in, from the songs to running gags like Dewey ripping sinks out of the walls. Weird by contrast is static. It's premise is spelled out at the movie's start and, short an action movie riff right out of Stallone, stays in that lane. Instead of rock 'n roll's corrupting influence it's replaced with polka, which is of course the joke. But then it just...stays there, hitting the motions that it needs to but not really building on the absurdity of the whole premise. The script feels like it was written 10 years ago, they finally got the funding they needed to actually make the thing, then they merely blew the dust off the old girl instead of building it up.
The musical numbers illustrate this the most. If you have ever seen Weird Al live (highly recommended) you know that his performances are insanely high energy, wriggling around on the stage and the audience, throwing his whole pussy out into the bit of whichever song he's doing. Here, we get Daniel Radcliffe lip syncing to a bunch of his songs in full, including "I Love Rocky Road," and "Like a Surgeon." Now, I am a huge Weird Al fan so far be it from me to suggest the songs are anything but wonderful, but in the context of the movie the songs just are padding time. The movie stops dead to accommodate, and we're left watching a less energetic version of Weird Al do the Weird Al thing.
The best song performance in the movie is "Another One Rides The Bus," which takes place at a Boogie Nights styledpool party featuring a wide variety of celebrities playing another wide variety of celebrities (my favorite is Paul F. Tompkins as Gallagher, though Conan O'Brien as Andy Warhol is strange enough to warrant a mention). At this party Wolfman Jack (Jack Black, of course) and Queen bassist John Deacon (David Dastmalchian) challenges Weird Al to prove that he is the mega talent he says he is and make up a song on the spot. In a nice reference to the actual low fi recording of the original, his drummer starts banging out a beat on his accordion case and like lightning he spits the song out. Naturally as it continues, everyone at the party starts adding in their own sound effects from Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) tooting bike horn to Gallagher smashing a watermelon. It's a nice allusion to the original and has a very "We Put The Spring in Springfield" feel. But notably it is the only musical number that feels like it is actually incorporating it's surroundings in a fun way. All the other songs are Al on a stage performing. Why restrict something as potentially freewheeling as a Weird Al movie to that?
The ending of the movie was very funny, including one of the best end credits I've seen in a minute. (Featuring a brand new Weird Al song that, as the movie notes, is technically Oscar eligible. Don't be a coward, Academy.) But overall there is a lot to be desired here. I'm comparing the movie to Walk Hard a lot and perhaps that's unfair. At the end of the day that was a full budgeted theatrical feature film with lots of room for sillier throwaway gags and the like, while this is a Roku Original Feature with a budget of $8 million or so. But it's hard not to when it is returning to so much of the same ground. Like I said, I am a giant Weird Al fan, to the point where I am one of those dweebs who says thinks my favorite work from him is less the direct parodies and more of his pastiches, stuff like "Nature Trail to Hell", "Frank's 2000 Inch TV", "Skipper Dan" or "Hardware Store". Watching this I felt like I was experiencing the Weird Al movie you would have always expected from him, a faithful parody of a familiar tune. But if you look at something like Weird Al's first film UHF, that's maybe more in tune with what Al Yankovic's appeal is, a DIY goofball creating his own version of the entertainment industry that's, well, weird. It's the "Don't Download This Song'" to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story's "Canadian Idiot".