Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is the fourth movie with a colon in the title I've reviewed this year. In other disturbing trends, this is also the second time this year I've had to cop to my limited, stereotyped knowledge of NASCAR.
To quote Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles: "What in the hell in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin' on here?" A silly, immature and downright funny comedy, that's what.
Bouncing back from two bombs (Bewitched, Kicking and Screaming) in which he departed from the scattershot farces that have made him a star, Will Ferrell and writing partner and director Adam McKay once again mine gold out of another fertile topic: rednecks and their fascination with stock car racing.
I say rednecks because southern "culture" is the film's victim more than anything else—and not in a Jeff Foxworthy sort of way either. The comedy tactic of choice here is ridicule; it's mean, plain and simple, and I liked it. I don't know what that says about me, or the people whom it steps on, who are supposedly also one of its largest target audiences. It's an interesting strategy, marketing to people who deride NASCAR and its followers as ignorant country folk and the very people who the filmmakers think are too dumb to recognize when they're being mocked.
That's not always the case, of course, and some familial connections to that crowd have suggested they didn't care for the movie very much. The box office ($148 million) would indicate otherwise. Then again, NASCAR actually has a much more diverse fan base than a movie like Talladega Nights would lead you to believe.
Sociology experiment aside, I laughed myself stupid at the simpleton characters and random, nonsensical gags that have become hallmarks of comedies from Farrell, the Wilson brothers and Steve Carell. Most of their films, from Old School through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, seem to have discovered the fatal flaw of the doofus (doofi?) movies that came before them: taking the plot too seriously.
This has been plaguing comedies all the way back to Stripes—a riotously funny first half followed by a painful second half when the plot takes over. (Another good example is
The Money Pit, which couldn't have had a better opening 45 minutes and then stops being funny on a dime when the plot takes over.) The aforementioned superstar crowd has mastered this pitfall by determining to make the plot's resolution secondary to maintaining the spirit of the film. It defies all logic, but it works by keeping us laughing instead of suffocating the humor with constraints of the plot.
Talladega Nights is no different, and it even managed to alleviate the one huge fear I harbored going in: the soundtrack. Instead of getting bombarded by lots of pop-country crap, it featured a tolerable dose of 1970s and 1980s rock mixed with respectable country music artists like Steve Earle, Waylon Jennings and a great cover of
Gentle On My Mind by Lucinda Williams.
Let's face it: Ferrell and McKay weren't out to please the NASCAR set at all, and that's why the film works. That and a brilliant supporting cast (John C. Reilly, Gary Cole, Jane Lynch and Amy Adams) with one exception: Sacha Baron Cohen.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, and I know he's become all the rage now thanks to Borat (which I'll get to later), but frankly I was offended by his portrayal of Ricky Bobby's main racing rival. Not because he's a gay Frenchman mind you; but because his performance is akin to plagiarism of Peter Sellers. His attempt to steal scenes by turning his character into a less-bumbling, yet even more over-the-top Jacques Clouseau really rubbed me the wrong way.