beat for beat, second for second, the funniest parody I've seen in years

Rating: 10/10 (24 December 2007)

"...and remember it doesn't say Cox, unless I say it tastes like Cox."
This is an example of prime send-up, a parody that lovingly references everything in rock-music-bio-pics, from (the obvious centerpiece) Walk the Line, Ray, Don't Look Back, Elvis flicks, The Doors, and countless others, including a mention to Yellow Submarine and the eras of Motown, rockabilly, even punk (yes, more than a decade before there is punk a version of Walk Hard is played). Kasdan and Apatow get what it is to do a send up, which is to be knowing of all the conventions, clichés, and formulas that end up coming out of what are, actually, real-life stories already put into a simple context. It follows the tradition of the ZAZ team (Airplane and Naked Gun) by delivering a joke or gag or just something weird every other second, and it builds up into one of the funniest movies in years.
A friend of mine said recently that it takes someone to actually really like and admire what they're spoofing in order for it to be pulled off. This helps, of course, as one can tell that Mel Brooks had a love for the theater and musicals for The Producers and horror movies with Frankenstein, and more recently Edgar Wright with action flicks and Hot Fuzz. But there's another component, I think, that separates a film like Walk Hard from the recent slew of "Movies" (Date, Epic, the upcoming Meet the Spartans) is that the people working on Walk Hard are some of the funniest people working in Hollywood today, and knowing what makes fresh, vulgar send-up work. It's not simply about mashing up pop-culture references to make them stick, there has to be just something that clicks through the writing and acting.
Walk Hard has that in spades- from the opening jokes (yes jokes, and they're running ones) about Dewey slicing his brother in half with a machete (with the brother still giving words of advice cut in half, and leading up to the also running gag "The wrong kid died!" line), going into playing the blues as a little white kid, to being 14 (and played by Reilly, of course) marrying a 12 year old fan, to the sudden bolts of inspiration for songs in the middle of a scene- not to mention the lyrics- it's already apparent this will be good stuff. But then there's more: Hasidim music agents with names like Kvetch L'Chaim; drug scenes out of Ray "You don't want to do this!"; the ups and downs and the meetings with other famous stars ("Hey, George Harrison"). I could go on and on about the little details as well, some of which are probably too much to even mention in this review.
Suffice to say Reilly pops out of a shell that he's been in over the past decade or so. One of the superb character actors of his generation (yes, I'm sounding like a pompously sounding critic for now), he's fantastic as Dewey Cox, giving him a sensibility that goes past simple parody- we actually end up feeling for this drug-addicted adulterer who goes in and out of rehab and finally settles in with his few dozen children of various mixed ethnicities (the catching montage, by the way, is priceless). He gives the character that 'umph' that even makes him more human than Leslie Nielson's Frank Drebin, and he creates so many absurd moments that it's easy to miss some of his subtle charms and dramatic touches. Just seeing him talk to a ghost Jonah Hill as "older ghost" brother Nate reveals his multi-faceted gifts.
And like A Mighty Wind, Kasdan and Apatow and composer Michael Andrews make the songs legitimately good numbers amid some of the crudest innuendo in movie history (songs go between 'innocent' sexual acts to midgets and then to a huge orchestral number including countless tribes-people). Reilly also has the backup, acting-wise, of people from SNL (Meadows and Parnell), The Office (Fischer and Ed Helms) and of course past Apatow works (Rudd, Black, Long and Schwartzman give a movie-stealing scene as the Beatles in India). In the end, it's everything I love in a go-for-broke comedy that still sticks to the numerous predecessors it's imitating. And, if anything, it one-ups those movies as well as legitimate entertainment.
So Walk Hard... Hard... to the movie theater!