If you see something steaming behind a horse watch that before this. (Hot Rod (DVD))

Member Name: Ailran

Product:	Hot Rod (DVD)
Date:	01/05/09 (194 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looking at Isla Fisher

Disadvantages: The plot, the story, the acting, the direction... oh I could go on forever!

Cashing in on the spate of loser comedies blazing into the cinemas in the last couple of years Hot Rod could possibly be the one that brings the whole genre, Apatow and Rogen notwithstanding, crashing down to Earth in a spectacular smash.

Hot Rod is a terrible film that isn't just not funny it isn't even slightly amusing. Not one laugh is gained, or emitted, form the story of Rod and his redneck friends. Rod is a wannabe stuntman, a man who wants to take after his dad who worked with Evil Knievel before he died in a tragic accident one day. Rod's one aim is to emulate his dad and to do it in his memory.

His stepdad, a very over the top Ian McShane, is always trying to toughen Rod up... by challenging him to fights in the basement of their home (very much in the style of Clouseau and Kato)
His stepbrother is one of his 'team', and is always trying to promote Rod and his stunts, which go wrong pretty much every time he attempts one.
To make matters worse then is the gorgeous next door neighbour, Denise (Isla Fisher - the one good thing in the film), someone he fancies like mad, has an overbearing, smart ass, rich boyfriend. How can he compete?

Hot Rod is almost indescribably bad. The hapless fool trying to do good is a staple of films, and can work very well if done the right way. Hot Rod though doesn't just have a completely unsympathetic main character (he is too much of an idiot) it has a star who just doesn't have the charisma or style to pull it off. A good humorous script may have helped out a bit but again this is puerile without being funny at all.
The idea is a reasonable one but this does manage to fail on pretty much every level possible. Hot Rod is, as I said, not a character that makes you sympathetic towards him and his crew of idiots are even worse. They are the sort of bunch that make you want to give them a good kicking every single time you see them. Annoying, obnoxious and, following the trend of the film, not funny at all.
When the loathsome stepfather is second only to the cute girl next door in likeable characters then you know that you are in for an experience you really are not going to enjoy.

Still if it was funny, if it made you laugh then you could forgive these horrible characters, but the comedic elements in Hot Rod are severely lacking and the attempts at levity fail again and again.
I would say that maybe it is just not to my taste, it was lent to me and highly recommended to me by a friend of mine, but I do love a lot of these kind of films. Blades of Glory and Balls of Fury recently for example I loved.

Hot Rod is competently made, I will say that for it, and both McShane and Fisher survive it with their reputations intact. The star, Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg, and the rest of the cast deserve nothing except criticism. Samberg in fact should be kept away from film roles for the foreseeable future.
The director, Akiva Schaffer (only known for Saturday Night Live before this), can be forgiven as he does do the best he can with the awful acting and script he has been lumbered with, though why he let them have a spoof scene in the movie based on the classic 80's musical Footloose and Kevin Bacon's dance in it when the target audience for this movie will not even have been alive when it came out I don't know.

Watch Hot Rod if you like juvenile, puerile, unfunny, total rubbish movies but if you have any brains at all avoid it like it was the plague.
Personally this is possibly the first film I have seen for a long time that I wish I could give no stars to.

Summary: One of the worse films I have ever seen