It’s a strange position Eric André finds himself in. For a few years, he was the great hope for a fringe oddball to slip into the mainstream, his talk show a meeting point of post-Tim and Eric surreality and Jackass-style extremity. The Eric André Show became about as big as a cult hit can manage before suffering the fate of so much left-of-center American comedy — famous people starting to toddle over, bringing with them viewers and absolutely no self-awareness that they might be making the show worse. André’s subsequent attempts to go straight have largely fallen flat, including sitcom stints and movies roles that fail to capture the playfulness of the work he had control over. Now, into the fray comes some bright spark at Netflix who swears they’ve found the answer. You can practically hear the pitch: a double act, that’s what he needs, someone straight to bounce off, someone to wrangle his weirdness, and who better than former wrestler and current ham hock in a polo shirt John Cena? Inspired stuff folks. Now we just need to wait with bated breath for a buddy cop film co-starring Triple H and Meatwad.
In Little Brother, Cena plays Rudd, a high-end realtor and burgeoning star of a Selling Sunset-style reality show. He’s a success, has a lovely wife (Michelle Monaghan) and family, but feels demeaned and overshadowed by his mega-rich celebrity older brother (Christopher Meloni). Into this situation strides Marcus (André), a former “little brother” to Rudd as part of a mentorship program from the days of their youth, now intent on recreating the relationship Rudd barely remembers, and neglecting to mention he’s escaped from a mental institution.
Now, this setup is of course unimaginative, part of a long line of films essentially remaking Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning under a different name, but there’s at least the potential for fun here. Besides, if you’re going to update any film, the one where an outsider upends the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie makes a lot of sense in this cultural moment. This leads into one of the film’s better ideas: making the choice to center a reality TV realtor as the profession of choice for a character who’s not evil but is monumentally insufferable is pretty spot on, and the swipes at the world of “constructed reality” are decently well observed. That aside, however, Little Brother plays out as painfully run-of-the-mill stuff, a strung-together selection of poorly executed and cliché set pieces, all public rim jobs and scenes of accidentally getting high that you’ve seen before and better, with a few bits of self-consciously moving material scattered throughout. The vibe aims for a Farrelly brothers’ style of wilfully lowbrow silliness, but the whole thing is too staid and characterless at every level — particularly in its lifeless direction, which is a shame coming from Matt Spicer, whose Ingrid Goes West had an energy totally lacking here — to inject any life into its subpar script. One is tempted to describe the relationship between script and direction as having the feel of HAL doing Andrew Dice Clay bits, but that suggests an interesting tension between the two, where in reality both just plod through, workmanlike in the blandest of ways.
Matters aren’t helped by fixing Cena to the film’s center, though in the actor’s defense he’s fundamentally miscast as a worrywart with an inferiority complex. That is obviously not the persona Cena organically brings in any way, and he has also never been much of a transformative actor. (In truth, he’d be more suited to play an actual Transformer than the demeaned real estate agent he does here.) The frustrating thing is, he has such talent orbiting him: André, Monaghan, the duo of Caleb Hearon and SNL’s Ego Nwodim as the scheming conspirators at the heart of Rudd’s reality show — they all turn in muscular efforts here, but simply can’t ever lift off because of the absolute anvil of a script tied to them.
If this all seems unduly harsh, perhaps that’s fair: Little Brother isn’t attempting anything anything grand, happy to be taken in as a humorous little trifle. But in its way, that’s what really irritates: the sheer lack of ambition on display. It feels as if Spicer, alongside screenwriters Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel, have used the truth of making a lightweight, knockabout comedy as an excuse to take the blandest possible route to the end credits. There are countless films that aim for nothing but a bit of daft fun, and that do so with imagination, that pulse with care and heart, and that crucially don’t think that a reference to Hoobastank is a joke in and of itself. That’s the drab, insipid wavelength Little Brother if unfortunately content to ride.
DIRECTOR: Matt Spicer; CAST: John Cena, Eric André, Michelle Monaghan, Christopher Meloni, Sherry Cola, Caleb Hearon; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: June 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
Comments are closed.