Much like Tommy Boy, Black Sheep isn’t that great of a movie. It has a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, I know that isn’t any kind of official score for anything. But some things are more of a metric than others are. And a movie’s score on RottenTomatoes.com is usually a pretty good indicator of how well liked by the public it is. It’s a very well-known and very popular website.
Personally, I think Black Sheep is the better of the two. Even though it’s lesser liked by most fans. It does what Tommy Boy should have done. It puts Farley in situations that he’s good at. The intense, outrageous, over-the-top scenes. He’s screaming, he’s running around, he’s falling into things. It’s mostly slapstick and juvenile. It’s predictable for the most part. And as far as writing goes, well, that’s why it has a 29%…
But just like I said in my review for Tommy Boy, Chris Farley isn’t a flavor, he’s a spice. You can’t put him on screen for an hour and a half and expect him to keep your attention. He can’t be the main attraction. He’s just too much. Could you eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day? Of course not. You’d get sick of ice cream pretty quickly, wouldn’t you? Ice cream’s good once in a while, but you can’t keep doing it all the time.
And David Spade is an actor that’s just made for cartoons. He’s got an animated character’s voice, but the talent of a high school drama student. He worked well on SNL because he was only on screen for a little bit at a time, and there was always someone there to cover for him. But I’ve never seen Spade do anything except act like David Spade. And that’s not really acting. That’s just being on camera in different clothes.
But you know what? Go and see Black Sheep anyway. Because even though it has a bad rating, and even though people might not like it, and even though Spade and Farley aren’t good actors, it has a bunch of funny parts to it. A lot more than Tommy Boy did. And if you’re going to watch one, you might as well watch the other. And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…
Leave a Reply