Once, again, Ben Stiller is not funny.

Rating: 3/10 (13 August 2008)

In the interest of explaining how bad this movie is, I'll have to tag this with Spoilers! You've been warned.
Ben Stiller used to be funny, back when he had his show and first started breaking into movies. He was an original persona, a kind of bumbling fool, and he was good at it. Ninety movies later, he hasn't changed a bit.
Why is getting hit with a stick by a ten-year old drug lord funny? Why is a ten-year-old drug lord funny? It isn't. Why doesn't Ben Stiller realize it isn't? He could go for the smart jokes--there's plenty of smart jokes in this movie that could have been, but instead he opts to put on kabuki paint and act like a retard.
This may be the only movie I've ever seen where a five-year old getting thrown into a river isn't funny. How could that go wrong? Thankfully Robert Downey Jr. is in this movie; he saved me from slitting my wrists. He and Brandon Jackson as Alpa Chino have some genuinely funny exchanges, and his comic timing is once again impeccable. Jack Black, usually reliable, is given almost nothing to do. Even Danny McBride, hilarious in Pineapple Express, gets nothing to do here. He's a cliché of a macho special effects guy, and if that's the point, the point isn't funny.
This plays like a Zucker brothers movie, but those movies haven't been funny for years. This is like a much more expensive "Date Movie." I should have checked before going to see it: "Directed by Ben Stiller" would have kept me at home.
I guess my point is this: Why am I so angry that my brother got sneak preview passes to this? I mean, I could have gone my whole life without seeing it, but I was lured in by it being free.
I'm an idiot, but not as big a one as Ben Stiller.
I mean, you tell me