A somewhat interesting failure with a miscast star.

Rating: 5/10 (12 April 2000)

I went to see this movie knowing very little of Andy Kaufman, and I came out knowing little more. While structured in a semi-interesting way, the movie worked too hard to be entertaining and not hard enough at making Andy a believable person--it was impossible to get to know or like Andy. Whatever you thought going in was the only thing you could think when you left. Jim Carrey's performance seemed barely adequate for the task, and he was not able to cover up for his lack of acting ability here any more than in his previous big screen "triumph," The Truman Show. While the sequences involving the cast of Taxi reprising their roles from the show (with Danny DeVito, the producer and another actor in this movie, conspicuously absent), very little of the rest of the movie displayed the same life or energy. In the future, I hope filmmakers who would like to create biopics of complex (or perhaps misunderstood?) figures will take a lesson from the failures of Man on the Moon and make sure the movie reveals something about its subject that goes beyond common knowledge.