PopSyndicate.com

Walk Hard is the story of Dewey Cox, or the parodied life of Johnny Cash with a bit of Brian Wilson, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis thrown in for good measure. After Dewey’s brother Nate gets chopped in half by Dewey during a machete fight, the latter develops a determination to be great when his father declares that the wrong son died (exasperatingly ad infinitum through the rest of the movie as well). That drive takes him into country music in the 1950s where he becomes a rock legend, and from there he travels the music landscape into the late 1970s, plagued by many wives, a slew of kids and a ridiculous drug habit as he tries to discover the real meaning of his life.

I’ve been one of the Judd Apatow faithful for some years since his days with Paul Feig on the great Freaks & Geeks, through the underrated Undeclared and into his later, more successful projects like The 40-Year Old Virgin. Apatow has been my personal King Midas of comedy, but under the directing hand of co-writer Jake Kasdan, Walk Hard is pure fool’s gold.

This film is just not funny, at least by any consistent measure. It’s a spoof through and through in a Top Secret vein, but it never establishes any reasonable yuck factor. There are threads, beats, and singular visuals that are snicker worthy, but those are tiny pebbles in a river of forced, repeated and often blunt, uninspired jokes.

Walk Hard feels like Kasdan wanted it to be Anchorman with its odd, out-of-left-field bits, but the Kasdan/Apatow script rarely pushes any comedic boundaries. Where the Will Ferrell film was content with small vignettes of jokes, this one tries too hard to have a threaded story that relies on too many call-backs to jokes that were only mildly amusing on the first push.

Given that the film spins on a musical axis, thankfully the soundtrack music leaps up to seize control and provide some measure of real levity. Great swathes of musical color are ripped from each era that Dewey lived in and it feels authentic, but cracked like Top Secret’s “Skeet Shooting USA.”

Like all Apatow projects, the DVD is packed with as many extras as possible, making it well worth your dollar if you find any reason at all to buy it. The first disc has two versions of the film, the theatrical and the director’s cut, and the usual amusing multi-member film commentary with Apatow and company.  The second disc has a wonderful in-depth look at developing the music as well as the original demos for the film, and full length performances from the movie. There are also three mildly amusing fake-urettes: a look at how the “real” Dewey Cox inspired other musicians, a tribute to Cox’s life with John Hodgman (the PC from the Apple commericials), and how Kasdan cast penises, because for the first time in Hollywood history, there is almost as much penis screen time as breast. Packed in last there are usual includes: deleted scenes and a making of.

Judd Apatow has been a rising star, but maybe this movie exposed him as a Daedelus, with Kasdan serving as his Icarus; their failure is certainly magnified by how high expectations are for Apatow-sponsored projects at this point. If Walk Hard were released just as a singular album of music, it would be a shining example of spoof and Americana, but unfortunately it’s a movie crushed by the oppressing mediocrity of Kasdan and Apatow’s script.

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