Gentlemen Broncos

You will know within 2 minutes of watching this if you can watch all of it or not - it is anti-Hollywood, just about anti-indie, a brilliant take on boredom, eccentricity, makes unoriginality into hyper-originality and is generally like a 1930s freak show with a side order of banal.

Seriously weird, and yet oddly familiar, the psychodramas and models of parenting and the wakwardness of friendships are all twisted in a maelstrom of ideas that just keep on coming. Every character is explored not for character but for something odd, find the oddness, in the face, the mannerisms etc; and its in their eccentricities that you find the story.

However, behind all of the strangeness, there is consummate skill: the actors are all just on the line between satire and buffoonery and it all works brilliantly. This is a truly strange, odd, little film with Sci-Fi roots and strange strange buds.

All I can say is plunge in - it is one of the stranger films out there - yet it has heart and humor, and many will recognize the nerdcore COS world it inhabits all too well - if off the wall is your cup of tea you can rest assured you have found the right stop...weirdly brilliant....

Seeing this was released in 2009 my first thought was, "Oh yeah, there WAS a follow up to 'Napoleon Dynamite'... wasn't it not that good?" Now I'm watching it in 2024 and it's better than 'Asteroid City', so either entertainment was so good in 2009 that 'Gentlemen Broncos' was considered "mid", or entertainment for the last decade has lowered the bar to where 'Gentlemen Broncos' is now comparatively "good". Regardless of how we got here, I'm enjoying it now.

Jared Hess certainly continues the weirdness in this one. 'Napoleon Dynamite' pioneered the art of bludgeoning the audience with awkward character actors, which he does again here. The first time I saw ND I couldn't find the humor through the cringe, and it took multiple watches to appreciate. GB is much less grounded in reality and more absurdist slapstick than ND, which imho makes it more accessible to a general audience.

I like the characters, the actors, and the story, but some of the characters lean a little too hard into their stereotypes to where they lose some believability, and the believability of the characters was a strength of Napoleon. Great cast, sets & props, music, cinematography, lighting, etc.

Saying 'Gentlemen Broncos' was "ahead of its time" implies it does something profound, which it doesn't; but it was ahead of its time in the sense that if it came out today it would probably receive more praise than it did in 2009.

As a fan of Breen, Wiseau, DeCoteau, Nguyen, MST3K, Rifftrax, EFAP, etc, I appreciate the bad films.

So, I completely understand why people do not like this movie. It can be gross, confusing, and just plain stupid at times. With that said, it is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Jemaine Clement and Sam Rockwell fell into the roles of some of the funniest characters I have ever seen. There are some lines when both in and out of context made me laugh so hard I cried.

This movie is not for everyone, I think people who like both napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre will find some enjoyment out of this(which I don't). More importantly, I think people looking for some sci-fi fantasy literature satire will get a kick out of this, because both the dialog with the "Authors" and all the excerpts from the two books had my laughing out loud constantly.

I watched this with my 10 and 6 year old boys and we laughed the whole time. It's a ridiculous movie, with crazy, interesting and incredibly funny characters. Jennifer Coolidge is brilliant, as usual. Benjamin, the main character, is believable as a thoughtful, possibly gifted outsider amongst crazies. There are lots of fun shifts between the main plot line and Benjamin's created one, the story that was stolen. His story is shown via perfectly bad sci-fi movie scenes, complete with dialogue believably written by a teenage boy. We loved it - happened upon it and were glad we did. I saw a negative review for the movie and will say I thought it was MUCH funnier and better than Napolean Dynamite.

Three other films spring to mind that Broncos reminds me of in the sense that they all bring similar elements; absurdist story structure, over-the-top character-acting, and an unapologetic bevy of immature, toilet-ish, sometimes abstract humor.

What I can't think of is two people other than me that actually enjoy this kind of film a lot. And I'm guessing you can't either. That's why I think these kinds of films do badly. It breaks down like this;

• 10%; people who even knew this was coming out - 5%; of those people saw it - 2.5%; of those people liked it - 90% of everybody else doesn't care - 100% of those people who didn't care would probably hate this worse than could possibly be imagined.

If you disagree and love this film, see box office receipts for, and then watch; Land of the Lost, Freddy Got Fingered, and UHF. Not only are they three excellent movies in a similar vein, but they all bombed beyond oblivion for the same reason.