Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Theatrical Film Review)

 

Stars: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gary Cole

Director: Adam McKay

Critic's rating: 2 out of 10

 

Review by Chuck O'Leary

 

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is Hollywood's first NASCAR comedy since Stroker Ace (1983), a much-maligned box-office flop that began Burt Reynolds' decline in popularity.  Stroker Ace was the fifth of six movies Reynolds let his stuntman buddy Hal Needham direct, and was the film Reynolds did instead of the role Jack Nicholson wound up playing in Terms of Endearment, a part James L. Brooks had written specifically for Reynolds.

 

To this day, Reynolds himself acknowledges that was one of the stupidest moves ever, but despite getting hammered in almost every review in its day, Stroker Ace really isn't all that bad.  It especially looks a helluva lot better after seeing Talladega Nights, which is so sub-moronic and witless it makes Stroker Ace look like a sublime exercise in sophisticated comedy.  Yes, it's pretty pathetic that contemporary Hollywood can't even make a stock-car racing comedy that's up to the standards of Hal Needham. 

 

Talladega Nights is the excruciatingly dumb reteaming of the guys behind Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, an overrated comedy that at least had its moments.  Co-executive produced, co-written and directed by Adam McKay, the film stars co-writer, co-executive producer Will Ferrell as an obnoxious dimwit (there's a stretch) from the American South named Ricky Bobby who always wanted to drive fast and be a race-car driver just like his dissolute deadbeat dad (Gary Cole).  As an adult, Ricky Bobby attains his goal of becoming the No. 1 racer on the NASCAR circuit, and lives in tacky redneck glory with his shallow gold-digger wife (Leslie Bibb) and two appallingly behaved little boys.  Fellow racer Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly) is Ricky Bobby's equally dim-witted best buddy.

 

But Ricky Bobby's world begins to unravel after humiliating himself by running around on the track in his underwear after an accident and coming down with a psychosomatic case of paralysis.  Before a screening of Talladega Nights, I saw a man who was a quadriplegic moving his wheelchair through the theater lobby by blowing into a straw.  God bless that man, and I thought of him again during Talladega Nights when the idiots on screen were making paralysis jokes.  Apparently, no joke is too low in today's pathetic world of "comedy."  Anyway, Ricky Bobby must also deal with the betrayal of his wife and Cal (it's too stupid to even go into) and the challenge of a haughty homosexual racer (Sacha Baron Cohen) with a thick French accent.

 

All of this idiocy is played to the broadest possible degree, only generating a couple of mild chuckles along the way as everything else dies with a thud.  Rivaling the equally lame-brained Nacho Libre as the most painfully unfunny comedy of the summer, Talladega Nights is Ferrell's worst movie to date -- yes, it's even worse than Bewitched.  The only other noteworthy thing about this puerile stinker is its wasting of recent Academy Award nominee Amy Adams, so good in last year's Junebug, as Ricky Bobby's sincere, on-the-rebound love interest. 

 

Like so many movies released in the summer of 2006, Talladega Nights should come with a warning, "For Masochists Only."