Baby Boy Reviews- Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star

Nick Swardson's stand-up is hilarious. Eric and I was listening to his stand-up comedy CDs on the way to Memphis for our St. Jude Trip and I was laughing the whole way.  So I thought surely his new movie has to be good.  I was wrong.

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star is about a man who succeeds in the porn industry despite having none of the talents or assets required for the job. The movie was made by people who have succeeded in the comedy industry despite not being funny after leaving SNL or stand-up.

This awful thing, awful even by the usual standards of awful things, is the first starring role for Nick Swardson, a once-promising stand-up comedian who has cast his lot with the Adam Sandler posse. After co-writing Grandma’s Boy and The Benchwarmers, he has written this awful thing, with Sandler and Allen Covert, and it has been, for want of a better word, “directed” by Tom Brady. This is the Tom Brady who made The Hot Chick and The Comebacks, not the Tom Brady who plays football, although who’s to say which of them is better at making movies? The football Tom Brady would probably have the good sense NOT to include a scene where a farmer applies peanut butter to his crotch and has goats lick it off, so he might have the advantage over filmmaker Tom Brady, who lacks such discretion.

Swardson plays the title character, a naive, sexless Iowa man-child with buck teeth and a pageboy haircut. I mention his teeth and hair because the movie also mentions them — constantly, in the form of other characters mocking them. (They teach that on the first day of Lazy Comedy Writing 101: for easy laughs, give a character an abnormality and just have everybody make jokes about it!) One night Bucky’s friends introduce him to pornography, which Bucky has never heard of, and masturbation, which Bucky has also never heard of. He is instantly a fan of both, even after also discovering, in the worst possible way, that his own square, nerdy parents (Edward Herrmann and Miriam Flynn) used to be popular porn stars.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the Larsons share with Bucky their fond memories of making porn, and he is inspired to go to Los Angeles to follow in their footsteps. I'll spare you the rest of the details and tell you to save your money and walk past this movie on the new release wall at your rental place.