As a cautionary tale, the new action-comedy Crazy Famous feels very timely in its depiction of a grown man willing to do anything to achieve fame.
After all, we live in a society fixated with reality television, internet fame and widespread notoriety, and we’re seeing a large swath of people maneuvering to just get noticed, regardless of the reason.
But Crazy Famous isn’t about our digitally dumb age. No, it’s about a guy named Bob (Gregory Lay) who was raised by a mother and father who constantly instilled in him, and reinforced at every opportunity, the notion that without fame, his life would be meaningless.
Bob grows up, and suddenly decides to fast-track his lagging aspirations by launching himself over the fence at Camp David on a weekend when the POTUS isn’t even on retreat. This boneheaded maneuver lands Bob in a mental institution where he forcibly defends his family upbringing as being completely justified and refuses to hear logic from a psychiatrist who tells him that his pursuit of fame is both misguided and illogical.
Once remanded to the state institution, Bob meets Larry (Victor Cruz), who has anger issues and violent outbursts, and Dr. Phil (David Neal Levin), a portly sequoia of a guy who believes he’s really that “Dr. Phil,” so much so that he even emulates Phillip McGraw’s annoying speech pattern.
Bob also meets Smith (Richard Short), a dashing raconteur, who purports to be a British secret agent and who says that Osama Bin Laden is really alive and hiding in rural America.
Bob latches onto Smith because he believes that helping Smith capture Bin Laden will finally catapult him into the history books and make him a household name, thereby finally giving his parents a son to be proud of. Naturally, Bob and Smith devise a plan to jailbreak from the asylum to go hunt down the most wanted terrorist in the world.
Are you laughing yet? Me either.
Crazy Famous is the kind of high-concept comedy that rarely works as well as hoped. I could say it’s the equivalent of a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to its breaking point, but that would be unfair to SNL. Hell, A Night at the Roxbury was funnier.
Director Paul Jarrett and screenwriter Bob Farkas, making his feature debut, are simply out of their depth here. Crazy Famous pitches like a drunk trying to navigate a cruise ship deck during rough seas.
One minute, it plays like an unfunny take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Then, it’s a poor man’s Escape from Alcatraz. Before long, Smith is kicking ass like James Bond as the foursome try to reach Bin Laden’s lair, which only Smith knows the location of. There’s also a rice paper-thin subplot about a shadowy government agency, and its hawkish director, who are shown interrogating Smith in brutal fashion, which seems to suggest that Smith is actually a spy with genuine intel, but Jarrett and Farkas never offer any answers to that.
As bad as Crazy Famous is, the movie is noteworthy for some of its performances, namely Short, who looks wholly comfortable playing a resourceful super-spy/possible madman.
Short should be recognizable to viewers — his IMDb resume is chock full of guest appearances on shows like Covert Affairs, Agent Carter, American Horror Story, Fringe and more. Based on this role, and the commitment that Short brings to his character’s bare-bones backstory, a major network should snatch him up and give him his own action series.
Here’s the thing about a movie like Crazy Famous — it wastes multiple opportunities to take a breath and actually be about something, instead of trying to be every genre of film at once.
Farkas’ script makes light of mental illness. It presents Bob as a complete schlub for no other reason than he’s tragically un-famous. It shows his parents going so far as to adopt neighborhood children with talent in sports or music simply so they can say they helped guide and influence a “winner.” Even once Bob seems resigned to accept that he is just an ordinary average guy, Crazy Famous throws in an unnecessary twist designed to set up a potential sequel (please, God, no).
They say movies can influence people. Taxi Driver prompted John Hinckley Jr. to try to kill Ronald Reagan to gain favor with Jodie Foster. The Town inspired an Illinois couple to rob a bank. Fight Club influenced a New York teenager to attempt a Project Mayhem-style uprising. Even Twilight encouraged a student in Iowa to try his hand at vampirism, and he was accused of biting 11 classmates in one month.
It’s enough to make me wonder, and worry, about the possible ‘message’ that some viewers might glean from Crazy Famous, especially given its ridiculous, tone-deaf depiction of serious societal issues.
This article appears in Jan 18-25, 2018.