Review of My Name Is Bruce (2007) by Gareth R — 01 Aug 2010

Fans of Bruce Campbell are used to watching bad movies. That's not to say every film that stars Bruce Campbell is, by definition, a bad movie. The Evil Dead films pretty much launched the career of Sam Raimi, whose buoyant and thrifty direction couldn't be tempered by a nearly non-existent budget. Bubba Ho-Tep features Bruce's best actual performance (as an ageing Elvis), and is a winning mix of indie quirk, low budget thrift and good old imagination. Bruce has been in good films, and he has been good in them.

Of course, he also attracts his share of terrible movies. Sitting through every minute of Alien Apocalypse ought to earn one a reward for endurance, and that's only the tip of the Sci-Fi Channel iceberg. Bruce himself is the first to tell you that McHale's Navy sucks, or that Crimewave blows, or that he isn't exactly proud of Terminal Invasion. It is not a new experience to see him in something dreadful, then, but by no means is he doomed to do nothing but. He has a winning, everyman likeability, mixed with a pretend-pompous action hero schtick that pokes fun at big-budget A-movie stars, and that usually pulls him through.

The reason I'm beating around the bush is that I am a Bruce Campbell fan, and that his film, My Name Is Bruce, is a bad movie. The reason that's a shock to the system - when, as we've established, he's had his name on some turds over the years - is that he directed it, probably helped write it, and has clearly invested a lot of himself in it. The things that suck about it can't necessarily be blamed on somebody else.

In essence, My Name Is Bruce is a cheeky self-portrait, but unfortunately one that does him no favours at all. And that's not because the Bruce depicted in the movie is a sleazy, talentless drunk; it's the movie itself that sells him short, and ends up undoing a lot of the work that his sharply-written autobiography, If Chins Could Kill, accomplished half a decade earlier.

The premise is simple: a teenager awakens a bloodthirsty demon, Guan-Di, and fetches his movie star hero to sort it out. Soon the town of Gold Lick is dependant on Bruce Campbell, who of course is not up to the task. If it sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen either Galaxy Quest or The Three Amigos, which had the same idea, and both did a better job of it. Of course, the premise actually made sense in those movies, where pop culture icons were mistaken for real people either by aliens or confused, early 20th century peasants who didn't watch a lot of movies. In My Name Is Bruce, a town of fairly normal people in the present day somehow think a B-Movie actor can rescue them from a murderous monster, for some reason. The implication is that they're too inbred to tell the difference. Nice.

Inept plotting is only the beginning. Presumably in an effort to support B-Movie actors, My Name Is Bruce is filled with no-names ranging from the quaintly odd to the shudder-inducingly talentless. The opening scene, of Bruce fan Jeff (Taylor Sharpe) and his fellow geeks making out in a cemetery, is horrifyingly amateur, and it's par for this particular course. It's also an early showcase for the film's cheap and unimaginative gore effects, which are presumably a homage to Bruce's Evil Dead days. What he's seemingly missed - somehow, despite making three of those films - is that Sam Raimi didn't just re-shoot the same decapitation gag fifty times. The monster effects, not to mention the direction in general, are severely lacking in variety and imagination.

That also goes for the script, which as well as copying better movies also includes enough awful, laboured humour to make the flying eyeball scene in Evil Dead II look like Wodehouse. The terrible acting (and subsequent delivery) is partly to blame, but the humour itself is often just unfunny. We've got crude foreign stereotypes, mostly courtesy of Ted Raimi, who is possibly after Rob Schneider's Crown Of Shame; vaguely venomous gay references (complete with desperately broad nods to Deliverance and Brokeback Mountain), and the running joke of Bruce being an unlikeable jerk, which piques with him drinking booze out of a dog bowl while mumbling that he can't sink any lower. Subtle. Apart from that, we're invited to laugh at people getting scythed in half by Guan-Di, which as a visual gag is lucky to stir any reaction at all once we've seen it half a dozen times. The whole thing is depressingly broad.

It's not as if I wasn't expecting a cheap B-Movie rife with cheeseball humour. But did My Name Is Bruce really have to be quite as bad taste, lazy and unfunny as this? It's hard to believe you're watching the same man who wrote If Chins Could Kill, which I increasingly suspect will remain the artistic highpoint of his career. The book was a self-depreciating look at the silly business of making movies, from the perspective of a man who knows he's not at the top. It managed to champion the imagination and effort that go into so-called B-Movies, despite admitting with perfect frankness that they can sometimes be exactly the cheap stink-fests you think they are. My Name Is Bruce would seem to have the same goal, yet it celebrates the apparent awfulness of these films and nothing more. It's lucky for Bruce that the film's target audience - die-hard Evil Dead fans - will be the only ones watching, because anyone not already enamoured with this strange and loveably humble film star will walk away from My Name Is Bruce without any intention of coming back.

Bruce Campbell knows he has a built-in audience for this movie; he also knows that it will struggle and probably fail to find anyone else. There's a very real feeling of settling for that. The film is comfortable with its chop-suey monster splatter, its wince-inducing Ted Raimi bits and the lame cop-out conclusion, because it's already won the only meagre victory it was aiming for: the DVD shelves of a few thousand Evil Dead nuts. Their only genuine reward is the occasional chuckle shrapnel, either courtesy of the hit-and-miss "Bruce is a jerk" routine, or the film-within-a-film he's shooting, Cave Alien 2, which is actually a pretty good satire of Campbellâ??s Alien Apocalypse schtick. A less cheesy satire, where the depressed Campbell attempts to make something audiences will deem half-decent, while trying to escape the likes of Cave Alien, might have been a better movie. (Coincidentally, it's the premise of Campbell's second book.) Instead we got Galaxy Quest done on a shoestring, armed with a halfwit script and a two or three verse themesong that's repeated so often, you'll wish Guan-Di would show up in your living room, sabre in hand.