Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (2011)

Directed by: Tom Brady | 93 minutes | comedy | Actors: Nick Swardson, Christina Ricci, Don Johnson, Stephen Dorff, Ido Mosseri, Kevin Nealon, Edward Herrmann, Miriam Flynn, Mario Joyner, Tyler Spindel, Meredith Giangrande, Nicholas Turturro, Mary Pat Gleason, Jackie Sandler, Dana Goodman, Curtis Armstrong , Michael O’Connell, Brandon Hardesty, Adam Herschman, Pauly Shore

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star is a bad movie, but it does have an upside: the movie opens with the low point, the peanut butter scene at the beginning of the movie. Bucky (Nick Swardson, who most likely wasn’t born to be a star) still lives with his parents in a small town in Iowa, is an incredible loser. You can’t judge people by their appearance, but you can if they can do something about it themselves. A visit to the orthodontist and a decent hairdresser instead of mother with the batter bowl had already made the sulk a more attractive appearance. In combination with his unworldliness, there is really nothing to bind him to the viewer.

An evening with ‘friends’ suddenly makes Bucky a lot wiser: he learns how to masturbate and sees his mom and dad in an old porn movie. When he asks his parents about it, they tell him the story they actually wanted to keep until he was 50: they were famous porn stars in the 1970s. Bucky suddenly sees that his future lies there too: he wants to be a porn star, just like his parents! So off to Hollywood. In a dingy diner, he meets Kathy (Christina Ricci – who makes the best of it), who is nicer to Bucky than the norms require. She arranges for him to be accommodated in the apartment complex where she lives; though the landlord (Kevin Nealon) has an extremely short fuse. Via via, Bucky is introduced to Dick Shadow (Stephen Dorff), the biggest – in both senses of the word – porn star out there right now. At a party, Bucky is made fun of by this horse-ridden actor and it turns out that Bucky has a very small penis.

Another meeting with someone from the business has more potential: Miles Deep (Don Johnson, one of the few reasons to give this film another chance) is a pill-swallowing filmmaker who could use another success and apart from the fact that he once worked with Bucky’s parents, the aversion to Dick Shadow creates a bond. However, the recordings go horribly wrong when Bucky already cums when he sees the breasts of his co-star. Disappointed, Bucky sees his dream shattered, but when it turns out that the video on YouPube.net is a huge hit, Miles sees a lot of money in making Bucky movies. Men feel boosted in their egos when they see the size of Bucky’s genitals and women love their partner again because a comparison with Bucky can only work in their favor.

A film about a somewhat stupid character in a new environment can work well, as proved in ‘Cedar Rapids’, in which Ed Helms portrayed a childish man, but in ‘Bucky Larson’ the concept is simply taken too far. Bucky has no social skills, so the fact that he has “friends” in the village where he lives is hard to imagine, let alone that a woman like Christina Ricci is attracted to him. The whole movie pretty much revolves around Bucky’s abnormal teeth, his haircut, his minuscule gender, and the fact that he doesn’t even have to touch women to ejaculate. According to the makers, more jokes are apparently not necessary. Who is this movie made for? It can only be a very limited target group. The well-known Hollywood stars who have attached their name to this project cannot be blamed, because on paper the film still has a nice starting point. Porn is such an easy subject for a comedy that it’s incomprehensible that nothing has been done about it.