The Comebacks has all of the entertainment value of beating yourself over the head for 90 minutes.
It is a terrible spoof of sports films taking bits from Radio, Miracle, Friday Night Lights and every other successful sports movie from the last decade. Theaters should sell a piece of rawhide with every ticket for the audience to gnaw on to keep them from biting off their tongues.
David Koechner plays Lambeau Fields, a coach who has never won a game. He is hired to coach the Heartland State University Comebacks. What follows is the worst spoof and one of the worst films in history. This movie has absolutely no redeeming features. It is unfair to expect a coherent plot or exceptional acting from a farce, but this film pales even to its peers.
The jokes in this film are never funny, and even worse the vast majority of them are offensive and degrading to nearly every ethnic group, gender and sexual orientation. Most offensive is the character of Ipod, who is a caricature of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character from Radio. Instead of being portrayed with respect, Ipod is used as a mentally handicapped minstrel whose primary gag is humping characters' legs. There is also a full-length version of Journey's Don't Stop Believin' in the middle of the movie that makes you want to dig your eyes out with your ticket stub. Sadly, the entire movie is made up of unfunny jokes like these.
This is unfortunate because great spoofs exist. Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Airplane! are all classic genre spoofs, and some of the funniest comedies ever made. The Comebacks simply chose not to try. It caters to the absolute lowest common denominator. It steals jokes and scenes directly from other movies and hopes that its audience will not notice. The Comebacks squanders its audience's trust to see a good movie and gives them a pile of celluloid excrement.
Most tragic of all is Koechner. He has established himself as one of the best contemporary, comedic actors with characters like Todd Packer from The Office and Champ from Anchorman, but even he can not elevate this movie beyond schlock. In his interview with The Post, Koechner said that it is important to be with his family, and that has to be true if he suffered through making this movie because it is hard to imagine such a talented actor making such a terrible film.
The Comebacks is absolutely not worth seeing. It is juvenile and crude; even for the biggest fan of sports movies, there is no point in seeing this film. It would be unconscionable to recommend this movie.-
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Chris Bruce
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