A Night at the Roxbury is a 1998 comedy starring Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan. It’s based on their Saturday Night Live sketches “The Roxbury Guys”. The movie is literally an extended version of one of the sketches. It starts the same way all of the sketches does, and it goes from there. It’s not necessarily bad, but you’re taking a one joke thing and trying to turn it into an hour and a half movie. There’s not going to be all home-runs when it comes to the script.
The sketches themselves are funny. But much like Chris Farley, it only works in small doses. You have to know when to cut it off. A lot of A Night at the Roxbury is filler material. For exactly that reason. Some scenes just aren’t funny because they were just put there to make the movie longer. They needed a plot to fill out the script, and they needed some characters to add to the plot. So, they had to make up some scenes for the movie. That’s what happens when you write AROUND something instead of coming up with new material.
That being said, it is a funny enough movie. It’s not like it doesn’t make me laugh. There are plenty of good lines in it. It’s just that, for as many good lines as there are, there are just as many lines that you’re sitting through, waiting to get to the good lines. And there aren’t any lines that you can really call “great” in this movie. As opposed to some other comedies that I know of.
The acting in this movie is one thing that actually gets done really well for how mediocre of a script it is. Everybody in it is a professional actor. And I don’t mean just because they’re paid, but I mean a well-known professional actor. They’re SNL members, Richard Greico, Dan Hedaya. People with experience, who’ve been doing it for a long time.
So, yeah. Go and see A Night at the Roxbury. It’s not the greatest comedy ever. But it won’t let you down. You’ll at least laugh enough that you won’t be sad that you watched it. And isn’t that all that we really want out of life? And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…
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