Hot Rod
Genre: Comedy
Cast: Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Bill Hader…
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Release: (2007)
Oh, Andy. I really didn’t want to do this. I mean I really didn’t want to have to do this – as in I was consciously aware before I even began watching this movie that it would be unfair to do this. But you just wouldn’t let it go.
It’s been no secret to anyone familiar with your work that someone – whether it be yourself or Lorne Michaels – has long been trying to position you as SNL’s new “Adam Sandler guy”. And, in many ways, it’s an understandable effort and a natural comparison that would have been drawn either way. You do have a lot of obviously similar qualities: the goofy, harmless, kinda-cute-but-not-so-much-as-to-seem-unattainable-to-regular-girls look; the functional music skills and better than functional knack for musical satire, the air of awkward shyness when not in a character, the initials.
Whether the similarities are natural or whether (as was openly suggested in the Saturday Night Live in the 90’s retrospective) you are simply one of an entire new wave of comics that have been trying hard to fill Adam’s shoes since he left, I will not speculate here. I might bet my house, eyebrows, future earnings and reproductive ability on which one I think it is in Vegas, but ‘speculate’ and ‘here’ – I will not. But I really, really, really didn’t want to just take the obvious route here and compare your first feature vehicle, Hot Rod, directly to the standard set by Adam’s, Billy Madison. I wanted to judge you on your own merits. I wanted to try to be more reasonable than that. But you just wouldn’t let it go.
With every randomly inserted musical number, you encouraged the comparisons yourself. With every fumblingly awkward scene with a way too hot for you love interest, you begged the comparisons yourself. And still all of those might be forgivable as general movie crutches of this genre, but with every cringingly transparent attempt to do the zero-to-a-hundred, “calm, cool, quiet guy loses his temper and flies into a hilariously over the top rage and then calms right down again” gimmick that Adam has always buttered his bread with, you pretty much drew a line in the sand, spit on it, and dared everyone to try to not make the comparisons. Well, Andrew, you aska, you getta. Here now is the definitive, straight up, head to head comparison of Hot Rod and Billy Madison. And may God have mercy on your career.
Hot Rod vs. Billy Madison: The Reckoning
Rules of the game: Each movie will be graded on a scale of 1 to 5 in five separate categories. A 1 represents the lowest possible score and generally indicates a factor of pure crapulescence A 5 indicates the highest possible score and generally indicates a level of perfection equivalent to DaVinci’s perfect circle. The movie with the highest point total at the end of grading will be declared the greatest movie in the history of recorded time, including unrecorded time. In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I will award Hot Rod a five-point handicap due to the fact that I am on record as an admitted Adam Sandler apologist and fan. Okay, ten points.
Category 1: General Premise
HR: Twenty-something Rod Kimble (Samberg), arrested in perpetual adolescence, pursues his lifelong dream of becoming a famous stuntman despite the fact that he is incredibly uncoordinated and bad at it. (5 points)
BM: Twenty-something Billy Madison (Sandler), arrested in perpetual prepubescence, pursues his lifelong dream of graduating high school despite the fact that he is incredibly stupid and bad at it. (5 points)
Advantage: Push
Category 2: Strength of Title Character
HR: Kimble feels like a superficial regurgitation of many of the same type of SNL actor-created movie characters before him, with little new to contribute to the genre aside from a slightly different occupational setting. (2 points)
BM: Madison, at the time this movie came out, was on the cutting edge of the new wave of moronic, low-brow characters about to flood the pop culture in his wake. More stupid and less violent than The Three Stooges, but less stupid and more violent than The Jerk, Billy Madison may not have been the most original character in movie history but he was at least the product of an honest and original effort by Sandler to find his own voice (unlike Kimble, who seems to be the result of Samberg trying to find Sandler’s voice. (5 points)
Advantage: Billy Madison
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