“Dicks: The Musical” is not about Richard Nixon; although I do think a musical about Tricky Dicky would have been more entertaining. The movie starts with a message on screen about how these two gay writers/actors (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson) are playing heterosexual men and how brave that is. Unfortunately, that message on the screen was the funniest thing in the film, and we had to sit through 86 minutes of garbage.
This is based on an off-Broadway play, and I knew we were in trouble when it cast Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang as coke-snorting God (who is also gay). Just like his former castmate Leslie Jones – they’ve never done or said anything that’s ever been funny. Just being loud and obnoxious isn’t humorous.
This is not just the worst comedy of the year. It just passed “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” as the worst movie of the year, no matter the genre. One critic said in his review that it was the worst movie A24 has ever released (and they’ve released around 140 films!).
The story involves twins Trevor and Craig, who are the top salesmen at a vacuum company. Their boss (Megan Thee Stallion) tries to get the staff to compete for sales (and she has the only passable funny song). Soon, these two rivals realize they’re brothers separated at birth, and they try to pull a “parent trap” on their parents. That’s when I thought things looked promising, as the parents are played by Nathan Lane (who is coming off that horrible “Beau is Afraid”) and Megan Mullaly. His character has just come out of the closet, and has found these creatures in the sewer that he keeps locked up. Okay, I did laugh at the absurdity of him chewing up lunch meat and spitting it on their faces, while referring to them as “my sewer boys.” I’m not sure why, but I did. Mullaly plays an old lady in a wheelchair that sings about her vagina. The songs in this entire musical are never funny or clever in the least. Now there’s a scene at the end where we actually see that part of Mullaly separate from her body, and again, I’m not sure why I laughed at that visual.
The director is Larry Charles, who gave us the “Borat” films (the first of which was very funny). He really needed a re-write of this thing. And a different casting of the two leads would’ve been better. They’re horrible as actors, and not the least bit funny. They reminded me of two gay Jim Carreys from “Dumb and Dumber.” Just because you’re doing a musical number with dirty words, doesn’t equal laughter. It becomes the same joke repeated over and over. And they think they’re being edgy, and are probably thrilled they’ll be offending people.
When driving home with my wife, she was saying how offensive it all was. I told her I didn’t care about offensiveness, if it’s funny. There was a sex scene that reminded me of the wrestling scene in “Borat.” Just seeing naked guys tangled up in this, wasn’t funny. And I said the same thing back when Howard Stern was first getting big in the early ‘90s. Most of the time he’s saying stuff just to be shocking, it’s not all that funny or interesting. And yes, I get the fact that comedy can be a subjective thing, but I’m telling you – if you think this is funny, you don’t have a sense of humor. They’re trying to be like Howard Stern, when there’s a song called “God is a Fa**ot”. It’s as if they were saying to themselves – we don’t care that it isn’t funny, it will offend the religious folks.
The funniest part of this entire movie, are the outtakes during the closing credits. Maybe they’re also a bit more enjoyable because you know the torture of watching this crap is finally over.
Nathan Lane laughs during one outtake, saying it’s the most humiliating thing he’s done in his career.
Yep.
0 stars.