Review of My Name Is Bruce (2007) by Garrett C — 12 Aug 2015

Directed by and starring B-movie king Bruce Campbell, My Name Is Bruce sounded too good to be true.

I come from a special group of Bruce Campbell fans. The kind that salutes the man by raising their right fist upon reading or hearing his name, or seeing his face. And one of the lies in the script explicitly states that Bruce Campbell "is the greatest actor of his generation". That is pretty much the quintessential moment when viewers are likely to realize that My Name Is Bruce is intentionally the ultimate vanity film and proud of it. Considering the extent of my fandom, I should be the ideal audience for My Name Is Bruce. Unfortunately, I cannot deny that I am also a film critic and have to look beyond my mere personal bias to analyze My Name Is Bruce. And truthfully, it is largely hit and miss.

My Name Is Bruce serves as a directorial debut for Bruce Campbell, and it is clear that he still has a lot to learn. Being such a low budget features there is only a short distance that the production values can take it. This means that a lot of the gags are not as over the top as they want to be. The reliance rests heavily on the performance of Bruce Campbell more than anything else, and though his charms are refreshing and hilarious at times, there is not enough surrounding him to honestly support his effort.

As a low budget production, My Name is Bruce is proud of its status as a B-movie and embraces as much as it can. However, embracing it as a viewer is a different story. Since the production values of the film are so limited by the size of the film's budget, there is no room for the film to end up overblown in any area. Instead, the film ends up feeling rather tame. The film is not a spectacle of cheap visuals as there is very little use of them in the film, mostly occurring in a series of sporadically funny sequences depicting the antics of the story's antagonist Guan-Di, the Chinese god of the dead. Even during these scenes there is a constant sense of repetition that goes on, and I cannot help but compare it to the film that started Bruce Campbell's career, The Evil Dead. The Evil Dead had a small budget which it spent on making mostly a series ridiculous death scenes with a touch of creativity and blood to them. With My Name Is Bruce, the deaths are the same every time. In the rare case, someone gets shot by one of the human characters. But most of the time, Guan-Di is seen cutting off limbs and decapitating humans with a slow moving axe and very little blood and gore, limiting both the potential for shock and comedic effect in the narrative. But on top of all that, there are very few of these scenes in the film. Most of My Name Is Bruce is built off of a thinly sketched script with repetitive gags centred on an overly milked gimmick regarding the legacy of Bruce Campbell as a B-movie star. The script in the film is dull and puts too much responsibility onto Bruce Campbell to carry it even though as a B-movie actor there is only so much he can do when the material or production values are not up to his standard. I just feel like there is a genuine sense that the overall energy in My Name Is Bruce is lacking since the shortage of production values leave the horror themes of the film tame and the lack of clever humour puts the burden too much on the titular man himself. There is a lack of clever supporting characters or even sufficient referential humour to pay tribute to the fan base likely to enjoy the film. It's odd considering that writer Mark Verheiden wrote the hilarious screenplay to the Jean-Claude Van Damme cult classic Timecop which was packed with hilarious lines for audiences fond of the protagonist, yet in My Name Is Bruce there is not enough to satisfy viewers who do not hold the lowest level of expectations for this vehicle.

But since the focus of the film is all around Bruce Campbell's role in the production, his performance is one of the most determining factors on how much My Name Is Bruce ends up succeeding.

Bruce Campbell's leading performance evokes a somewhat mixed feeling. His leading effort is clearly the best part of the film and his natural charms should appeal to fans just fine, but the problem is that the film is a little too reliant on them. For a vanity project titled My Name is Bruce it would have been sensible that I expected that to happen, but I feel like the man is trapped in the wrong B-movie. Bruce Campbell is an awesome B-movie star because of his ability to take on villains with a serial adventure charm or because of his genuinely charming yet funny persona of a slacker, but My Name Is Bruce all too often makes him seem like a repetitive wimp without enough jokes to sustain that notion. He does everything he can in the role and ultimately he remains a likable and mostly funny presence, but seeing My Name Is Bruce brings me to the conclusion that his role as an actor proves better suited to working with someone else as a director. Still, any of the good scenes in the film are thanks to him and his naturally laid back and cheesy persona so credit is due.

So fans of Bruce Campbell are likely to find at least a modicum of kicks out of the actor's self-deprecating charm, but My Name Is Bruce ultimately adheres to the standards of a bad B-movie too often by filling its running time with excessive talking which is short on creative humour coupled with a sporadic use of tame death scenes.