I loved the Fat Boys when I was 10. The album with “Wipe Out” on it was one of the first tapes that I ever got. I remember really wanting to see this movie when it came out, but never did. I certainly haven’t been missing anything for 19 years.
Winslow Lowry (Anthony Geary, UHF) is in huge debt with gangsters, so he plans to hire three inept orderlies — Markie (Mark Morales), Buffy (Darren Robinson) and Kool (Damon Wimbley) — so they will inadvertently kill his ailing uncle Albert Dennison (Ralph Bellamy, TRADING SPACES), spurring Winslow to inherit all the old man’s millions. So the Fat Boys move into the mansion and wreck havoc on the place, inadvertently making Albert better.
The film for all intents and purposes is low-rent, recycled Three Stooges material. The Fat Boys have no timing, thus forcing the filmmakers to inject stupid cartoony sound effects to every gag to force laughs out of the audience. The plot is paint-by-numbers done by a caffeine addict who hasn’t had Starbucks in two weeks.
I was embarrassed for all involved, especially Bellamy, who seems so awkward in the role of the “hip” old guy. The film can’t make up its mind how it wants to portray the Fat Boys either. In the beginning, Buffy is stealing plates from the house, because he read in the paper that it’s a $1,000-a-plate dinner and then at the end, we’re not supposed to believe they stole stuff from the house. One moment the film embraces black stereotypes and then switches to the other side in the next moment.
All of this is in efforts to elicit laughs from really lame jokes. And because it’s a Fat Boys’ movie, the film crams in one really lame rap performance . Even though the “video” is filmed with zero style, it at least displays that the Fat Boys do have talent, however it’s not weaved into the film in any important way. The film was painful to watch the whole way through. Sometimes recapturing your youth can be a damaging experience.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
