Fool's Paradise

"Fool's Paradise" tries to be funny and entertaining. It tries. Charlie Day wrote & directed an homage to Buster Keaton and the Peter Sellers film "Being There," but he didn't deliver an entertaining film. It is meant to be a satire of who we make celebrities and how quickly our opinions can change. By the end, though, I just didn't care.

I love Charlie Day and thought he was perfectly cast to be the lead. His eyes portrayed his naivety perfectly, but he lacked the physical comedy and over expression that would have made this more entertaining.

What he needed was help. He needed a partner to help with both writing and directing duties. Someone to say "that's not funny" or "this scene makes no sense and needs a rewrite." I get what he was trying to accomplish and I hope it leads to more attempts by Charlie Day. But I hope the next attempts are better.

I shouldn't have paid attention to this movie as long as I did. The premise was kind of interesting and had the potential for a mid to good plot, but it was just so chaotic without actually going anywhere.

The whole movie was just a bunch of stuff happening to this random guy who has no memories, doesn't talk, and has the intelligence of a 5 year old. Charlie Day's character, Latte Pronto, is essentially Charlie Chaplain's The Tramp. Latte has absolutely nothing going on. He doesn't interact with other characters in meaningful ways, and doesn't seem to have any thoughts, opinions, desires about the things happening around him. The plot literally happens to him and he's just along for the ride.

Which, ok, if you're gonna have an entirely blank character, then at least make the plot interesting. But the plot is not interesting. Charlie Day goes from the mental hospital to the streets of LA, then a director picks him up cause he's a dead ringer for his problematic lead, then he gets famous in a very "Step 1. Hit the streets of LA, Step 2. Become famous celebrity" kind of way. And that's essentially how the entire movie goes. He gets married, divorced, loses everything in such quick succession that I almost got whiplash.

This movie just needed something more substantial than it gave. Charlie Day's character was the perfect setup for a self discovery plot line, where he finds out who he is and/or who he wants to be through his experiences. I mean they could have had a moment at the end where he finally talks, and that would have been pretty cool. But the movie ends, and nobody important learns anything important, and nothing was accomplished, and also I didn't laugh once. Actually I did get some cleaning done between confused glances at my TV, so one thing was accomplished I guess.

Just a total snooze fest. It's been said in other reviews, and I'm not normally one to pile on, but dead lord... what happened here? I like Charlie Day just fine, the rest of the cast is good, the plot is of course quite dumb which isn't always a bad thing in a comedy such as this one, but it's simply not funny... ever, at all. It's just like the world's worst episode of curb your enthusiasm or something where there's no script at all and we're all expected to find it funny because the actors were funny in other things we've already seen.

I am someone who sticks out bad movies - almost always - but I gave up and stopped watching a little more than halfway through. I just didn't care, wasn't laughing, and had better things to do.

Skip this one.

A mute John Doe (Charlie Day) is found in a mental institution with the capacity of a five year old. He is released into LA where he is picked up by a movie producer (Ray Liotta). The producer is tired of the star of his movie and intends to use our doppelganger John Doe as a stand-in to replace his star. Lenny (Ken Jeong) is a weasel "publicist" who mistakenly calls John Doe "Latte Pronto" due to the producer's coffee demands. Latte is on his way to becoming a big Hollywood star.

This is a fascinating movie. Someday, someone will dissect this movie to determine why it's not funny. The most obvious reason is that Charlie Day is playing a mute. He has one of the most comedic voices in the world today. People laugh just by the sound of it. It's like an NBA player saying he'll play while having his hands tied behind his back. Sometimes, actors like to go 180 opposite their strength to show that they have undiscovered depths. They go against their popular narrative. In this one, he's trying to do his version of The Tramp. The character construction is too sloppy. He is literally a blank. Instead of a living breathing character, he is a hole on the screen. There is nothing there.

His nothingness may be the point. The movie is satirizing Hollywood and its nothingness quality. In that, this is not breaking any new cinematic grounds. It is ridiculous without being funny. Ken Jeong's over the top character Lenny is almost there at first until he meets Latte. There is a puzzling hole with Latte that overwhelms any chance for humor. The movie just dies.

This film is hard to watch for all the wrong reasons. The slow pace and general unfunniness represent a missed opportunity of such an amazing cast. If Charlie D. Is identifying as Charlie C. These day, he just needs to stop it. If Day put this project on hold to deliver this past season of Philadelphia, he has really just lost his way, and needs to surround himself with some new/fresh talent. Day's recent work (the past 5 years) is formulaic, as usual, but without the charm of his characters as their younger selves. The world seems to be maturing around Day, who struggles increasingly to make audiences laugh.