RocketMan |
  • USA • 1997 • 95m •   • Directed by: Stuart Gillard. • Starring: Harland Williams, Jessica Lundy, William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, James Pickens Jr., Beau Bridges, Peter Onorati, Don Lake, Bill Jenkins, Ken Farmer, Blake Boyd, Brandon Kaplan, Paxton Whitehead. • Music by: Michael Tavera.      During training, a member of the first manned mission to Mars is injured, and NASA chooses a replacement, spaced-out spacecraft designer Fred Z. Randall, to team with cocky crew captain William "Wild Bill" Overbeck, efficient mission specialist Julie Ford, and trained chimp Ulysses. Mission controller Bud Nesbitt backs Fred, but flight-director Paul Wick has doubts. En route to Mars, Fred's frenetic antics become a threat, but he wins respect with his navigational savvy.
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It stars Harland Williams as the world's goofiest spacecraft designer, Fred Z. Randall, who, after a series of inadvertent tests of his resilience, gets the nod to accompany astronauts Julie Ford (Jessica Lundy) and "Wild Bill" Overbeck (William Sadler) on the first manned mission to Mars. It's on this bare-bones plot that RocketMan hangs its gags. There is nothing to the story here, but still, it is arguably the best (read -- least bad) thing about this broken family comedy. The NASA setting and story tropes are passably distracting in the sense that they give you something to look at besides Harland Williams' bumbling clown act, but that is hardly a compliment.
RocketMan spends most of its time with Harland Williams as he does everything he can to squeeze any kind of laugh out of the audience, and it just doesn't work. Fred Z. Randall is a doofus to the 100th power. He flails, he screams, he makes funny faces, etc., etc., etc, but between Harland Williams' grating voice and mannerisms and the absolutely bankrupt writing, the comedy here is dead on arrival. I can't stress how terrible the script of RocketMan is. I refuse to believe that adults wrote this movie. There is not one ounce of wit in this movie. The jokes that are coherent are exclusively surface level potty humor, and worse yet, there are so many jokes that don't make any sense at all. For example, there is a long gag where Fred leads a sing-along of "I've Got the Whole World in my Hands". The big question is...Why?!? It's not funny, it's not sweet, it's not heartwarming, but it sits up there on the screen forever. It's moments of inexplicable confusion like these that convince me that this movie was written by small children, whose undeveloped brains are trying literally anything for a laugh.
What more can I say about this movie? It's bad, but in a way that is genuinely bizarre. I can't believe that this is a real Hollywood movie made by functioning adults, much less a Disney product. If you can try to imagine what a dumber-than-average three year-old might do with a mid-budget family comedy, lower your expectations 20%, and you end up with something approaching the monumental awfulness of RocketMan. I suppose I liked him in Dumb and Dumber, but Harland Williams and his dopey voice are simply infuriating here. His stupid catchphrase "It wasn't me" appears no less than 50 times throughout the movie, and it accounts for not one smirk. RocketMan isn't hurting anybody, but it crosses the level of unfunny, into the realm of total embarrassment. I can almost hear what everybody involved with this disaster must be thinking..
Review by jaredpahl from the Internet Movie Database.
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