Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story makes the third Judd Apatow film to hit theaters in 2008 and it stars one of my favorite actors, John C. Reilly, playing the fictional character Dewey Cox.
We’ll get one thing out of the way from the start. The movie is rated “R” for almost every reason there is for rating a movie restricted. Drugs, swearing, nudity and some fake scenes of someone being sliced in half.
And the nudity isn’t limited to just women. If you cringed and ran screaming from The Crying Game, the Dewey Cox Story may prove to be too much for you to handle.
(That’s what she said…or he said)
Walk Hard is a satire based on all the movies lately about famous musicians, like Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, or Ray in…Ray.
Dewey Cox suffers a major tragedy early as a kid which not-coincidentally mimics Cash’s early loss in his life. From there Dewey leaves home to find his “masterpiece” and gets into all sorts of trouble amidst a varied and crazy musical career.
You also get a fun performance by Jenna Fischer who plays Dewey’s second wife in the film.
The movie is very over the top, close enough to the Scary Movie chain of films at times to give you pause.
There are some hilarious parts and some parts that I think they hoped would be funny but weren’t. As mentioned above, this movie is very dirty and some of the jokes rely on people who will laugh at the word “Cox” all night long. For myself, I tend to like my a humor a bit more clever, but I still laughed a great deal.
But the humor is almost a secondary part of the movie for me, as the most enjoyable aspect was the constant stream of cameo appearances. You can see everyone who is in it from the IMDB cast list, but I’d hate to give them all away.
You will find many people from Judd Apatow’s previous films, plus some other famous faces.
My favorite would be the scene in which Dewey travels to India and visits The Beatles. The four guys who play the Beatles pretty much made the movie for me.
Overall, the movie works well for what it’s trying to be: A goofy satire on these musical bio pics.
As a comedy, it felt slightly less funny to me than Superbad or Knocked Up even.
AML Rating: B
I saw this movie the other night – funny, but definitely not a hit. I think that the funniest part is the sarcastic tone the movie takes towards the movies you mentioned like Walk The Line.
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The trailers definitely look funny, but not funny enough for me to drop $9 a ticket to watch it in a theater – I’ll wait until I can rent it.
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I had no desire to see this, (yeah, me who loves this stuff) but then I saw the scene on Funny or Die where Dewey goes to the back room where they are smoking out, and Tim Meadows tells him how he doesn’t want to smoke out…but it sounds more and more enticing “I don’t want no hangover” “Oh, it won’t give you a hangover.” All with ominous music in the background. Great stuff.
I’ll be renting it.
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