Tommy Boy

Tommy Boy; comedy, USA, 1995; D: Peter Segal, S: Chris Farley, David Spade, Bo Derek, Rob Lowe, Brian Dennehy, Sean McCann, Dan Aykroyd, Julie Warner

Clumsy Tommy finally graduated after 7 years of studying, but he doesn't have to worry about his future since his dad Tom is a wealthy owner of a car factory in Ohio. Still, there are intrigues from the young Beverly and her boyfriend Paul - Beverly marries Tom in order to inherit all his stocks, but then he dies. Together with his friend Richard, Tommy starts a tour around the country to sell half a million break pads in order to save the company, even though Beverly tries to sabotage his efforts. The rich Ray Zalinsky, the king of auto parts, already plans to buy the company and fire the employees, but Tommy enters his headquarters with a camera team and cleverly forces him to buy the parts and save the company.

Funny comedy "Tommy Boy" proves that the director Peter Segal can, despite a mediocre screenplay tending to be a moronic comedy, pull out enough good moments and naturally hilarious scenes, just like his previous film "The Naked Gun 33 1/3", but the bleak impression still prevailed. The characters are thin, the scenes exchange too fast in order to really concentrate on them and enjoy them and the worst part is watching cheap gags based on the main protagonist bumping or stumbling into something or aggressively forcing his comic persona in the lesser jokes, while the ending falls apart and doesn't have any ideas left. Still, despite the fact that the film doesn't have any deeper meaning, it's still somehow strangely appealing and fun, acting like a 'guilty pleasure', maybe because the comic duo of the overweight Chris Farley and the thin David Spade have some excellent chemistry, even more than in their other two films, and that some gags are honestly laugh-out-loud funny: for instance, the sequence where they pick up a dead deer in their car and it suddenly wakes up and demolishes their vehicle from inside, is silly and funny at the same time, as well as the one where the two of them pretend to be attacked by a horde of wild bees in the night in order to scare off some police officers, or when Richard is vacuum cleaning moths in his room, while some actors in the small roles are pretty good, like Rob Lowe as the evil Paul and the excellent Dan Aykroyd in the effective role as Ray Zalinsky towards the end.

Grade:+