Review of Gentlemen Broncos (2009) by Thomas W — 12 Mar 2010

I am not a fan of Jared Hess' work but this is probably his best film yet. That isn't saying much if you know how much I hated Napoleon Dynamite and loathed Nacho Libre. The main reason this is a "step up" is that it actually gives us a protaganist to care for in Michael Angarano's Benjamin.

I have hated Hess' other onscreen character creations as being lampoons and doofuses that we are supposed to laugh AT instead of WITH. It isn't as if he is making fun of "everybody" and being fair about it; he is just making stupid that we (a sane audience) is supposed to laugh at but he does this by intentionally making his characters Mormon or church-going or eccentric and odd.

We are supposed to laugh at people because of these things -- he relies on that to makes these characters quirky in the first place and that is an insult to all humanity. Its as if he thinks that people are funny and it isn't what they do that makes them so.

I did enjoy the D-grade sci-fi movie scenes interspersed throughout the film with Sam Rockwell; but not much else. I didn't even overly enjoy these ... but they were simply the part of the movie that wasn't making fun of a person for being a person.

It was trying to get laughs out of a stupid sequence of events. I am not one for laughing at others' shortcomings and Hess likes to put them on full display in his films. The best part of the film was its retro-cool soundtrack full of guilty pleasures like Cher's Just Like Jesse James.

You shouldn't really like it ... but there is something about it that I do. Now -- it is too bad I couldn't say the same thing about Gentlemen Broncos.