Hot Rod: Critic Reviews

Wait until the best parts pop up on YouTube.

Hot Rod might be called the poor man's Eagle vs. Shark. Poor certainly describes the quality of the filmmaking.

Silly but funny.

If you're looking for plausibility, this is not your movie. If you're looking for laughs, this is not your movie. If you like seeing delusional overgrown adolescents fall down a lot, then this one's for you.

There's no question Samberg has a future in movie comedy, but this caper amounts to a false start.

As a director, Schaffer has a cool, punchy style, but his full-length movie dead-ends. The flavor runs out.

Most of the jokes either drag on endlessly or are cut short without a real punch line.

A lasting problem with so many SNL-populated movies is the ingrown clubbiness of its humor -- the suggestion, whether overt or implied, that comedy is nothing more than a funny idea flogged to death by a fraternity of late-night wags.

It's funny pretty much all the way through, even in the final showdown between Rod and his stepdad. I have seen countless movie fights that stagger the imagination, but this one goes over the top and comes down on the other side.

Some hilarity does, in fact, ensue, but the laughs are interspersed with long stretches of dead air.

Samberg can't carry this, though director Akiva Schaffer supplies some hilarious, Jackass-style wipeouts.

A mashup of the random violence of Adam Sandler movies with the dimwittage of Will Ferrell's - and lacking the charms of both - Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

Hot Rod is a fresh, hip take on the Bumbling Idiot genre that made Will Ferrell a superstar, and Samberg throws himself into the role with an amiable mix of birthday-entertainer goofiness and klutzy bravado.

Consistently laugh-aloud funny, a guilty chucklefest of ridiculous stunts, gleeful pummelings and questionable jokes that looks as if it were made by high school buddies who had a few weeks to kill.

Those hoping for feature-length doses of Samberg's Lazy Sunday wit will have to settle for just plain lazy, as Hot Rod aims low and still manages to miss its target.

Started to go bad about the time someone in casting said, "You know what? I'll bet America is just about ready for the comedy stylings of Sissy Spacek."

Imagine a Stand by Me on wheels, with dialogue spoken by 20-something actors instead of 12-year-olds, and you have the essence of the script.

The film steals one of the best laughs of Jon Heder's surprise 2004 hit, the scene where Napoleon nosedives over a bicycle jump, and stretches the gag into an 86-minute movie.

Andy Samberg falls down a lot in this high-concept, low-witted comedy.

The film's low-key Wayne's World vibe takes it only so far. I laughed, then I wished it was funnier, then I just wished it would end.

Chock-full of references to bad teen movies from the '80s and saturated with sarcasm, Hot Rod is a cheekily fun sendup of Gen X iconography.

Awesomely dumb slapstick is for teens and adults only.

Oh, Napoleon Dynamite! What have you wrought? [Blu-ray]

...comedy is a subjective thing, and what makes one person laugh may simply bore someone else. Hod Rod bored me.