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PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/19/07)

Although the poster declares that Walk Hard is "from the guy who brought you Knocked Up and Superbad," it's actually got almost nothing in common with those two films apart from the Apatow name under "producer." In fact, it has more in common with Scary Movie or Naked Gun — but hold on, because it's actually a little better than the comparison implies.

Walk Hard aims to be the pin in the inflated self-importance of music biopics and the Oscar-hungry people who flock to make them, and this relatively narrow focus keeps it from being off-the-rails-anything-goes silly like the Leslie Nielsen or Wayans Brothers films. The film is silly, but its efforts are helped tremendously by Reilly, who digs into Dewey Cox as if he were a "real" character in a "real" movie and not just a blank slate off of which jokes can be bounced. The fact that Reilly also has real musical chops helps the songs in Cox's catalog seem almost legitimate and certainly memorable (there's a reason he's going on a nationwide tour in character). But this is unabashedly a goof from the get-go, and the presence of past and future Saturday Night Live alums ensure that 10 seconds do not go by without another joke. Such rapid-fire silliness, as you might expect, results in some jokes hitting, some falling flat, but very few moments of absolute boredom. There are certainly a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, which is more than can be said about a lot of alleged comedies.

Still, points should be docked because spoofs are, generally speaking, easy, and Judd Apatow and company have been able to make really funny movies that take place in the real world. Even though there's more at work here than, say, changing Pirates of the Caribbean's swishy Jake Sparrow into swishy Jack Swallows (geddit?), Walk Hard occasionally steps away from its conceit that this is not a spoof but an overly earnest film made by overly earnest people. The film does slip from time to time and indulges in random silliness, like an extended piss-take of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson that devolves into a bizarre, Incredible Hulk–inspired rampage or like Dewey insisting that he won't give into "the temptations" only to walk backstage and run into, yep, the Temptations. These steer the movie more into "joke for joke's sake" territory, but for the most part Walk Hard chugs along without too many of these problems. And the myriad cameos are almost across-the-board hilarious, which isn't so surprising seeing as the Beatles are played by Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman, and Justin Long, but which is really impressive when you watch the White Stripes' frontman Jack White completely kill as Elvis. Here's hoping more of White's sweaty, karate-chopping King shows up in the deleted scenes of the DVD release.

So you'll laugh, you'll groan, you'll leave the theater singing "I'm gonna beat off….all my demons/That's what lovin' Jesus is all about" — and isn't that, ultimately, a good thing? Yes.

— Eric Alt