Some people first heard of the name Bert Kreischer in 2002 because the film National Lampoon's Van Wilder was based on a 1997 Rolling Stone article that named Kreischer "the top partyer at the Number One Party School." Kreischer would often engage in heavy drinking and public nudity. He became a stand-up comedian where some of that public nudity continued. Kreischer is best known for taking his shirt off while on stage. It's his shtick for attention. One could interpret it as an expression of body positivity, but it's not much more than one would see at an average beach. If he truly wanted to make a statement, he'd do his stand-up act fully nude. He has hosted TV shows on FX and the Travel Channel. He's also done podcasts. A story he told from his time as a six-year student at Florida State University formed the basis of his Showtime comedy special. A clip from that special went viral in 2016 when it was posted on YouTube. That viral video is the foundation for this quasi-autobiographical but mostly fictionalized feature.
If you haven't seen the viral video, it's about 13 minutes of Kreischer recounting a college trip to Moscow, Russia, in which he befriends a mobster and unwittingly helps the criminal rob a train. Now, to depict Kreischer's time at FSU and the events on that train could be a fairly decent feature in itself. Recently, Brad Pitt did an action flick called Bullet Train (2022), which was about insane happenings on such a vehicle. This film about Kreischer's misbegotten college experience could have been simply limited to that, but that's not the case and there's more here, perhaps too much more.
The story in the viral video takes place 25 years ago when Kreischer was attending FSU. He's now nearly 50, is married and has two teenage daughters. Director Peter Atencio who worked on Key & Peele (2012) apparently had no interest in having Kreischer play himself as a college student, in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer (2001). Instead, Jimmy Tatro (Home Economics and American Vandal), an actor in his late 20's, plays Bert Kreischer as a college student. The film bounces back-and-forth between seeing Bert as a college student and seeing Bert as a nearly 50-year-old dad, played by Kreischer himself.
Tatro started out in stand-up but he's had way more acting experience than the real Kreischer and Tatro is clearly very good at it or at least good at the kind of frat boy characters he often portrays. Yet, Tatro is barely featured here or not as much as he should have been, given that he's depicting the events that went viral and garnered this theatrical deal. Either Atencio and his team didn't feel that time with Tatro was enough to sustain a feature or maybe they thought it would be too much of a repeat of National Lampoon's Van Wilder. Maybe, it was demanded that this film be more of a vessel for Kreischer to be on-screen.
I suppose that Kreischer's stand-up routine is more about him being married and being a dad. His shtick on stage is all about him taking off his shirt and performing while showing skin and showing off his "dad bod." If that's the case, then dwelling on this one story before that dad bod probably isn't representative of the bulk of his material. Therefore, it would likely not be what Kreischer's fans would prefer.
Mark Hamill (Star Wars and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm) co-stars as Albert, the father to Bert who visits his son during his granddaughter's sweet sixteen. While there, he and Bert get kidnapped when Russian mobsters show up wanting a gold pocket-watch that Bert stole 25 years ago during his Moscow train trip. The kidnapping turns out to be an opportunity for he and Bert to deal with their issues and have some father-son bonding.
Those issues include Albert not being able to be open and vulnerable in front of his son. Albert also is very hyper-critical of Bert, constantly nitpicking or not approving of anything his son does. Bert also has to reckon with his problems with his daughters, which are the result of how he was raised. This film also goes out of its way to extol and elevate the role of a comedian, almost to super-hero or certainly action film status that feels very self-aggrandizing. It reminded me of Nicolas Cage's role in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), only not as funny.
Iva Babić and Robert Maaser round out the cast as Russian siblings who are at war with each other over which one will take over their father's mob organization. Both are brutal killers. Maaser's character of Alexei is reminiscent of Dolph Lungren's role of Drago in Rocky IV (1985). Babić's character of Irina probably gets the funniest line in the whole film, referencing a 90's sitcom. Yet, this film wastes time on these siblings that should have been spent on Kreischer and Hamill's characters.
Rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual references.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 52 mins.
In theaters.
