WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY
All The Cash In The World, With Holly, Morrison, Lewis and
Dylan At His Juvenile Fingertips
PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"
By Omar P.L. Moore/December 21, 2007
John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story", directed by
Jake Kasdan. The film opened across North America today. (Photo:
Sony Pictures)
It has been a great year for Judd Apatow ("Knocked Up", "Superbad") and he culminates 2007 as a writer and co-producer on Jake Kasdan's hysterical film parody "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story", a juvenile exercise of sends ups of popular rock musicians from the 50's '60's and '70's. "Walk Hard" is the kind of film that achieves the feat of being tasteless and less filling. With guilty pleasure you gleefully enjoy its ribald, raunchy and nudge-nudge wink-wink hilarity, but as soon as it has ended, you forget most, if not all of it.
John C. Reilly, who after about ten years of supporting work
finally got the lead glory that he more than deserved with "Criminal", a drama
from 2005, now gets the singular spotlight in comedy as Dewey Cox, a
lame-brained musician from the South (stereotype one) who is determined to
pursue his dream, his father (Raymond J. Barry) be damned. His rise to
prominence is mockingly chronicled in documentary-like form, and all the sexual
innuendo in the world is thrown at the screen, particularly in a "Darling" song
sequence where he and Darlene, his would-be June Carter Cash (Jenna Fischer) do
everything but jump all over each other. Both before and after this
sequence, nothing is left to the imagination, as Cox, by name and nature is, and
are revealed. (When someone in the movie theater is heard shouting,
"that's small!", then you know that the previous line of this review isn't
written to deceive.)
Mr. Reilly is no stranger however, to this type of film, and while last year's
"Talladega Nights" set him up well (he will reunite with Will Ferrell in the
comedy "Stepbrothers" next summer) it was Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 "Boogie
Nights" that really served him best for his role here. In Mr. Anderson's
tribute to the hard living and loving of the seventies and the American porn
industry, Mr. Reilly (who has been touring select American cities in his Cox
personage in concert) played Chest Rockwell, porn star extraordinaire. He
was hilarious there as a sidekick to Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler, and he brings
and expands much of the misguided swagger of that character to his portrayal of
Dewey Cox, who has incarnations as Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and
Bob Dylan among others, and even partakes in a "Yellow Submarine"-like animated
head trip with a little help from four famous lads from Liverpool.
Through it all -- all the babies, wives, divorces, drug trips -- his black
drummer Sam (Tim Meadows) seems to have the world's entire supply of drugs at
his feet -- you would have thought that his drummer was the only musician, black
or white, who ever had drugs (stereotype two). Sam, who plays it again and
again and again with the drugs, is the quintessential drugmeister that Curtis
Mayfield once sung about, a Pusherman to a T. He admonishes and warns Cox
not to indulge in his grocery list of narcotic goodies, in a tone that ridicules
the "Just Say No" era of the 1980's. Mr. Apatow and Mr. Kasdan give our
protagonist a back story which starts in Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee,
where young master Cox has lost his smell, not his sight (unlike Jamie Foxx's
portrayal of Ray Charles in "Ray"), and a tragic mishap occurs that engenders
the ire of his father. Some of the back story provides laughs, but it is
an empty portion of the film existing only to stall time before the real
non-stop laugh riot begins.
"Walk Hard" is admirable, even if it is something of a one-trick pony, and when the steam peters out (no pun intended), like Keyzer Soze -- it's gone!
"Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America, for sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language. There is full-frontal male nudity and a couple of scenes of graphic violence, which the MPAA (surprise, surprise) appeared to have missed in its rating classification of this film.
Copyright The Popcorn Reel. PopcornReel.com. 2007. All Rights Reserved.