There is something about The Ringer.
Something good, something bad. Add it up and you have merely mediocre, a grade hovering at the pass/fail line.
More was expected. Johnny Knoxville, the quintessential Jackass, is the star. As well as being charismatic, Knoxville is a lovable goof who knows how to take a pratfall. So a slapstick comedy, like The Ringer, could have exploited his physical talent and still worked on the emotional plane.
In addition, the Farrelly Brothers are involved, albeit only as co-producers and mentors to director Barry Blaustein and writer Ricky Blitt (who, as an actor, appeared in the Farrellys’ Stuck On You). Love ’em or hate ’em, the Farrellys know how to push the boundaries of good taste to absolute extremes — for laughs and for social satire.
Ah, there’s the rub. Left to Blaustein-Blitt, The Ringer is too safe, too scaredy-cat to rile up paying customers.
The absurdist subject matter demanded something more risky and risque. The Special Olympics are involved (the official organization in the U.S. co-operated on the movie).
Here’s the plot: Knoxville plays a big-hearted Everyman stuck in a dead-end job. Circumstances — a friend has three fingers chopped off in a lawnmower accident — put our hapless hero in desperate straits. Knoxville needs $28,000 to pay doctors to sew the man’s digits back on.
Meanwhile, Knoxville has a sleazy, cigar-chomping uncle (Brian Cox mugs shamelessly). The uncle needs $40,000 to pay off a debt to the mob. So he concocts a scheme to enter his nephew as an athlete in the Special Olympics and engineer a sure-fire bet that will take both of them off the hook.
It sounds stupid but the movie asks you to suspend disbelief and go with the flow. The nefarious scheme is threatened when Knoxville falls in love with the Special Olympics volunteer (Katherine Heigl) and is tempted to blow his cover.
The movie initially encourages the audience to laugh at the mentally challenged athletes, many of whom are played by “ringers,” actors such as Jed Rees and Geoffrey Arend. Others, such as Edward Barbanell and Leonard Flowers, are the real deal and hold their own on screen.
As the story progresses, the object of ridicule is supposed to change from the Special Olympians to the so-called “normal” people, many of whom act like idiots: Knoxville and Cox, for example, plus Heigl’s two-timing pretty boy fiance (Zen Gesner) and all the mob goons.
But the movie is too clumsy to get the tonal shifts working. Blaustein (known for writing for Eddie Murphy as well as directing the acclaimed wrestling documentary Beyond The Mat) is not a good feature director yet (and maybe never).
Blitt’s script is lousy in terms of story and structure, although there are some laugh-out-loud funny lines (Cox mocks Canadians, for example) and good slapstick skits.
Still, The Ringer needed some South Park and a lot more Jackass. Or even the edge of The Family Guy. Blitt was a writer on that show so he should have known how to do it.
The creators of those shows realize that, if you tackle something as socially and politically sensitive as the Special Olympics, you have to push it over the top to get the cringe-worthy jokes flowing on the surface while you layer social criticism underneath, like a satirical rip tide.
The Ringer lacks that kind of crazy courage.
BOTTOM LINE
There are a few good jokes and some slapstick skits. But the clumsy movie fails to balance its humour with its social satire. Merely mediocre is not good enough.
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