Mostly these scenes create a jarring and amateurish juxtaposition with the primary reality TV aesthetic. This movie did not need to be brilliantly polished to succeed. The characters, shallow and stupid, can t be expected to change (and shouldn t).
But screenwriters Garant and Thomas Lennon don t give them enough to work with to keep us engaged. Most of the cameo characters, besides an appearance by Dwayne The Rock Johnson, that normally enliven the comedy are thinly sketched and unmemorable. Kenney has created endlessly unpredictable material with the lonely, put upon, racist, mean-spirited, married-to-an-incarcerated-serial-killer Trudy Wiegel.
But Wendi McLendon-Covey s Clementine Johnson is still playing the same blond tramp after four seasons. Rather than continue to play off their stock traits, the writers and cast should have used the new locale to reveal deeper abysses of their ineptitude and richer shadings of their hypocrisies. Garant and Lennon are successful Hollywood screenwriters ( Night at the Museum Balls of Fury [2007]) and could certainly have crafted a real story if they wanted.
Yet they seem to be operating under the illusion that the Reno cast functions best when approaching material with the same competence as their characters. The bare structure of the episodes collapses at just 80 minutes and the free wheeling improv doesn t hold it together. This is a movie that practically dares you to care that it doesn t.
Why fault something that clearly doesn t aspire to offer anything besides broad laughs? Individually it doesn t matter, but is part and parcel of a comedy trend that s been churning out crap by people who should know better. On the The Onion AV Club this week, in a discussion titled Is Improvisation Ruining Film Comedy?
Nathan Rabin rightly bemoans the endless parade of half-assed, kinda-okay movies with a smattering of good ideas and funny scenes that would benefit greatly from a few more drafts and a lot more discipline. The best improv-based television shows and movies, from This is Spinal Tap (1984) and other Christopher Guest movies to , allow the comedians to ad lib within the confines of intricately developed characters and a tightly scripted plot that allow comedic situations to ripen and play off each other to an organic climax with thematic resolution. Mostly these scenes create a jarring and amateurish juxtaposition with the primary reality TV aesthetic.
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