A Night to NOT Remember!

Rating: 3/10 (6 March 2020)

There have been several Saturday Night Live skits that were a perfect inspiration for a great feature-length comedy, like Blues Brothers, Coneheads and Wayne's World, but this pathetic excuse for a comedy begs the question of how it ever got made.
I have sat through many Pauly Shore, Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler comedies that were enjoyable in their own cringeworthy way, because the jokes were in bad taste but at least they made me laugh. This film doesn't have a single gag in it that made me crack up, I never got beyond an uneasy smile (thank you for that, Michael Clarke Duncan). Not only is the script unbelievably bad, but the performances really made my eyes bleed.
You'd think that the premise of two deluded losers who try to talk their way into an exclusive nightclub would be a perfect set-up for some good comedy, but it's not. This part of the movie is over in 45 minutes, and the rest of the movie is a badly written attempt to extend the plot with some scattered ideas to get the film up to feature length. But a bad script doesn't have to be the death blow to a comedy as long as the jokes are good and the actors can deliver. But the only thing worse than the script or lack of jokes are the excruciating performances by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan. Their clearly improvised exercise in hysterics really got on my nerves, and their attempts at picking up women are unbelievably creepy rather than funny. The #metoo movement could submit this film as evidence for how women were mistreated in the 1990s.
Clearly there are people who really like this movie, and that's okay. There are dozens of movies that score below 5.0 that I like. But how this ever got to a 6.3 here on IMDb is beyond me. No wonder that Chazz Palminteri remained uncredited (by choice, I hope). Even Freddy Got Fingered had more inspired jokes than this film. The only area where they put in some effort was the cool 90s soundtrack (although even Haddaway's 'Baby Don't Hurt Me' got stale after hearing it for the tenth time). I have a lot of good nostalgia for the era, but this movie is not part of it.