Trailer Made LAFF Edition: Hot Rod

Andy Samberg wanted the audience to disregard their program notes for Hot Rod. With a running time of around an hour and a half as opposed to the two hours suggested by the schedule, Samberg stressed to the crowd at the Ford Amphitheatre, “don’t pace yourselves. Let the laughs fly.”

They didn’t need to be warned. In an audience including Mr. Show’s Bob Odenkirk and Broken Lizard’s Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan and Erik Stolhanske, Hot Rod heralded the first Saturday Night Live star to succeed on the silver screen since Will Ferrell. Samberg and his Berkeley-bred partners in crime Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer have done the near impossible by skipping the awkward phase of feature lengths skits and bit parts in other films starring their fellow not-ready-for-primetime-players by putting together the most amusingly off-the-wall comedy since Adam Sandler got his NYU buddy Steve Buscemi to play a lipstick wearing assassin in Billy Madison.

Team America: World Police scribe Pam Brady gets credit for the screenplay full of non-sequiters and blunt segueways, yet some of the film’s funniest moments including the longest fall down a mountain ever captured on film and a group singalong gone awry are clearly the work of the trio behind "Lazy Sunday." Like most SNL-related films, there isn’t exactly dramatic tension to the story of Rod Kimble, the son of a late stuntman who wants to impress his new stepdad by earning $50,000 to pay for his heart transplant. Why? Well, to beat the crap out of him, of course, to prove he’s a man. (In a stroke of perfect casting, Deadwood’s Al Swearengen himself — Ian McShane — plays the disapproving stepdad.)

Samberg gets his fair share of beatings throughout the film too, as he’s blown up, thrown off his moped, set on fire at a children’s birthday party and used as a human piñata. Yet he keeps getting back up, flashing a goofy grin and sporting infectious charm to spare, perhaps the product the same enthusiastic go-for-broke spirit that permeated the best work of the film’s executive producer Will Ferrell. Not all the gags work - an all-too-literal riffing on the pleasantry "cool beans" will either excite or leave an audience cold, but like stuntman Rod, anything without risk is without reward. Current and former SNL cast members Bill Hader and Chris Parnell show up in supporting roles, with Parnell particularly shining when discussing the virtues of AM radio over those newfangled mediums of FM and television, but Hot Rod belongs to Samberg and the film’s director Schaffer, who raise stupidity to an artform and in the process have created the kind of classic that will be the talk of college campuses everywhere come August. In the mean time, check out the film’s trailer here.

-Stephen Saito

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