“There isn’t a single great, classic gag here worthy of mentioning after the film.”

Look, I’m a big Broken Lizard fan. I, for one, love what they do. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, you most likely know their films:
Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest. Their modus operandi is to take a standard overdone genre of film, add their own brand of comedy, and then spoof it in a manner that completely dissects the tropes and lays bear everything we both love and hate about those kinds of movies. Super Troopers was the classic riff on the underdog film and was a big swipe at the Police Academy movies and their ilk. Club Dread mercilessly slayed the masked killer genre. And Beerfest took sports movies to the next level by making the competition as ridiculous as possible. And I loved all of them.

That said, The Slammin’ Salmon is by far the weakest thing they’ve brought to the table in their professional careers. That’s not to say that it’s bad — but after ending up at Slamdance instead of Sundance and not yet finding a distributor, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I think director Kevin Heffernan (as opposed to Jay Chandrasekhar, who directed the previous Broken Lizard efforts), might unduly get the blame for this. And the fault here isn’t with the direction; everything wrong with the film lies in its foundation, not its execution.

The film is about a group of waiters working in a high-end celebrity-owned restaurant. When the owner, famous boxer Cleon ‘Slammin’ Salmon (played hilariously by Michael Clarke Duncan — really, he’s the best part of the film), comes up short on a bet, he bullies his restaurant manager (Kevin Heffernan) into trying to get his staff to make $20,000 in one night. This leads to an offer of a bogus $10,000 prize, which leads to a cutthroat competition for first place. The competition turns into a comic version of Glengarry Glen Ross without the sharp writing that punctuated that film. That’s not to say there isn’t comedy here, but it isn’t fall-out-of-your-chair funny. I smiled and giggled through large portions of this, but Broken Lizard films usually have me doubled over in my chair and howling. There isn’t a single great, classic gag here worthy of mentioning after the film.

I think the biggest problem here is that unlike previous Broken Lizard efforts, they aren’t really dissecting anything. Without a genre to tear apart piece by piece they are left to tell jokes the old-fashioned way — which isn’t what they do. All of their random, from-out-of-nowhere humor works best when it is tied to something we’ve seen in other films — guerilla satire of sorts. Inserted into a film with a standard narrative structure it all seems too random and wildly out of place. And in the Broken Lizard spoofs, you’re never really supposed to connect to their characters; in fact, this is their stock and trade. They don’t make characters that live on in your mind. They make cardboard cutouts based upon the needs of the genre at hand. This allows them to do terrible things to the characters while you laugh the whole time. But this kind of character doesn’t translate well to a comedy in which you should actually care about the outcome.

And really, I think that’s the biggest problem of the film. They attack this story like they do their spoofs, when instead they were telling a story in desperate need of characters. Not cutouts. So without biting satire and characters you can get invested in, the whole thing plays out like a fun, palatable pilot for a sitcom, not a high comedy feature film. And while it is never bad and it doesn’t suffer from poor direction, it is certainly disappointing and not up to the standards we’ve come to expect from the Broken Lizard crew.

Grade: C

Tags: movie reviews, slammin' salmon, sxsw reviews