Gentlemen Broncos

If you didn’t know Jared and Jerusha Hess were Mormon, you might wonder what the husband wife team was smoking when they came up with the script for Gentlemen Broncos. They drained Napoleon Dynamite of all its wit, humor and heart, and left us with odd-ball, unrelatable, one-dimensional characters and genitalia jokes. If it weren’t for the casting of Jermaine Clement (Flight of the Condors), the film never would have been funded or distributed.

It’s as if the couple strolled by a geodesic home in a tacky Utah neighborhood one day, and said to each other, “let’s make a film about a weird kid who lives there.” The result is a lethargic story about self-conscious science fiction writing teen Benjamin, (Michael Angarano) who lives with his night-gown designing mother, played by Jennifer Coolidge, and even she can’t get a laugh from her freakishly drawn character. One of Benjamin’s stories is ripped off by a couple of painfully weird student filmmakers, as well as by a notoriously successful schlock science fiction writer known as Chevalier. Thank heavens for Clement in this roll, or the film would be completely unwatchable.

Jared Hess’s loose and lazy direction is mind numbing. Perhaps the conceit is that, since the film is about incredibly schlocky writers and filmmakers, the film itself can be incredibly schlocky. There are two films within films here, both supposed to be so lame they’re funny, but that gag runs too long. All characters, plus the plot, appear to be in an alternate world daze, and some, such as young filmmaker Lonnie Donaho (Hector Jimenez) are just so strange they’re icky. Sam Rockwell is completely wasted as a badly-wigged sci-fi hero. Even Napoleon Dynamite fans will be hard pressed to relate to this cold mess.