Walk Hard : The Dewey Cox Story [DVD]

By Clint Morris

Its lead character’s may be missing a few strings from his ellis custom weissenborn guitar, but thankfully “Walk Hard” can still hit a high note when it’s required.

The third release of the year from comedy’s new golden-boy Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up”, “Superbad”), “Hard” takes the piss so much out of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” that you’d think Joaquin Phoenix would be tied up to an IV by now – being treated for Obstructive uropathy. But a spoof of Cash this is not, In fact, there are more warped caricatures of famous rock stars here than there are at a painter’s stand on the footpaths of a carnival.

Serial supporting player John C.Reilly (“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, “Boogie Nights”) graduates to leading man status (finally) in “Walk Hard” and quite frankly, it’s “Hard” not to keep your peepers on him. Reilly’s over-the-top performance as a musical genius with inner demons – he sliced his brother in half with a machete (“Let’s go play machete fight. Ain’t no terrible tragedy’s gonna happen today! “) – is a must-see. The joke is, of course, that Reilly plays Dewey Cox from the age of fourteen (yes, fourteen!) onwards – despite looking every bit of his forty-something age. The man has the off-the-wall character down pat, and if they gave out Oscars for spoofs, Reilly’s name would be top of the ballot.

“Walk Hard” moves (sometimes uneasily) between out-and-out spoof movie and oh-that’s-right-its-not-real mockumentary. The guts of the story, as the press notes tell us, is : “On his rock ‘n’ roll spiral, Cox sleeps with 411 women, marries three times, has 22 kids and 14 stepkids, stars in his own ‘70s TV variety show, collects friends ranging from Elvis to the Beatles to a chimp, and gets addicted to – and then kicks – every drug known to man… but despite it all, Cox grows into a national icon and eventually earns the love of a good woman – longtime backup singer Darlene (Jenna Fischer of “The Office”).” But the baby pool at your local swim-nasium is deeper than anything here.

Where this film differs from say Apatow’s “Superbad” or “Knocked Up” – and again, like “Superbad”, Apatow did not direct this film (Greg Mottola directed “Superbad”; Jason Reitman directed this one), he only produced it and co-wrote it (with Jake Kasdan), but the marketing men know exactly what they’re doing by putting the producer’s name on top of the poster – is that it’s more a crude spoof movie than a crude and witty slice-of-life comedy like, say, the pregnancy-centric “Knocked Up” was. In fact, this film is probably much closer to say “Hot Shots!” or a Leslie Nielsen comedy – he did about 500 of the things – than anything Apatow has been involved in before. And like any spoof movie – even good spoof movies – some bits work really well, and others don’t. But mainly, once the novelty (of seeing Riley play a teenage musical genius) wears off, which happened for me about the one-hour mark, your funny bone slowly starts to fall asleep. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very funny in spots (The ‘Beatles’ sequence – featuring Paul Rudd as John Lennon, Jack Black as Paul McCartney, Justin Long as George Harrison and Jason Schwartzmann as Ringo Starr – is absolutely hilarious!; they probably could’ve afforded to throw in a few more scenes like this – names playing famous rockers), but the air does seem to be slowly coming out of the film as it progresses… if even very slowly.

“Walk Hard”, even when the gags do start to slight, is still an easy film to watch – if even because it’s such a quality production. That’s actually Reilly’s voice you’re hearing singing the songs in the movie – I actually thought it might have been someone like Chris Isaak singing, so that’s saying something! –and he’s terrific. He did a great job. The songs themselves, as amusing as they are, are also quite well done. The production values of the film are also admirable. A lot of work has gone into this puppy. Just a pity it’s third-act didn’t have a little more bark. Still, compared to, say, “Hot Shots!” or “The Naked Gunn 33 1/3” it’s hit: miss joke ratio is significantly higher and never does it have to resort to the obligatory ‘guy runs into something – ouch!’ style gags.

DVD EXTRAS
30 minutes of all-new footage, deleted and extended scenes and musical sequences, and much more (Extras Unpreviewed)