Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021, Josh Greenbaum) (Patreon)

50/100

Major International Man of Mystery flashbacks—partly because Wiig doubles as horny hero and ineffectual supervillain, but mostly because both films seem as if they must have been expanded (ill-advisedly but understandably) from a recurring SNL sketch. Austin Powers is an easier insta-sell, so long as you're reasonably familiar with '60s spy movies and appreciate a stealth Lorne Michaels impression; Barb and Star, by contrast, are entirely personality-driven, and in a way that's outlandish by way of being aggressively innocuous. Tough to make work for more than four or five minutes at a time. I laughed when the ladies got distracted mid-crisis by a "Shell or High Water" stand on the beach, and at the random cutaway to talking club ("I like looking at wicker, but I don't like sitting on it"), and at various other isolated bits throughout. Never really fell for Barb and Star's dynamic, though, maybe because I'm unfamiliar with the source of the ribbing. (Don't think I've ever knowingly encountered a pair of culottes in the wild.) Wiig, in particular, doesn't really pop in either of these roles, ostensibly wacky though they are; her two-minute Knocked Up cameo, in which she simply sits there quietly negging the shit out of Katherine Heigl, will stay with me long after everything she does here has evaporated from memory. Mumolo fares better, though oddly enough she's funnier when separated from Wiig—together, they tend to fall into overly familiar routines (one of which more or less replicates the desperate joint improv shtick that Wiig performed with Will Ferrell at the Golden Globes some years ago). Pleasant, but nothing more.

Frankly, I'd expected this to be a whole lot more bizarre, given its cult status and the unconventional teaser that appeared back in late 2019 (which didn't appeal to me at all, but suggested something more like, say, Sorry to Bother You). At best, it's amusingly random—there's no reason, for example, to open the movie (and indeed the teaser) with a little kid passionately singing along with Barbra Streisand's "Guilty" as he delivers newspapers, and "there's no reason for this" is pretty much the extent of the joke. While I love a good non sequitur, the ones here, like Morgan Freeman the Crab, feel a bit half-assed. In general, execution lags well behind conception; Jamie Dornan's mid-film musical number ought to be a show-stopper, but the lyrics and staging just aren't that clever (even in their deliberate stupidity/literalness), and it winds up resembling a lesser Lonely Island short, like "Iran So Far" or "Best Look in the World." While writing the previous sentence, I tried to look up who wrote the song and found an oral history (already?) in which Mumolo says this:

I think we sent [Dornan] the script, “He breaks into an emotional dance, all off Kevin Bacon in Footloose,” or something. And that’s all we had. But then we really wanted to make our own thing and then it became what it was. We kind of put that in the script as a hopeful, almost like a joke, “and then this happens?” Hopeful with a question mark.

That's exactly what it plays like: a sequence that began as a placeholder and had to be hurriedly fleshed out later. Which is how comedies tend to be made nowadays. I'm not a huge fan of this approach, which does generate some free-floating goofiness that might never have emerged from a traditional writing process, but more often results in obligatory commitment to mediocre first-draft ideas. Also, I just prefer specificity. Drafting Reba McEntire to play a water sprite named Trish who miraculously saves the day doesn't do a lot for me (again, the randomness is the joke), whereas I very much appreciate a submarine designed with a surfeit of meaningless buttons and switches to be pressed and flipped willy-nilly, along with the instruction "Remember, don't keep the steering wheel too straight. Lots of tiny movements, left to right." Sometimes it's a joy just to know that you and the screenwriters have observed the same absurdities.