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This particular story follows the plight of a part time drummer/limo driver (John Candy) who is preparing to marry a Presidential hopeful’s daughter (Alley Mills), only a group of cult leaders (Richard Libertini, Dixie Carter, Paul Dooley) that use aerobics as a form of mind control want to hypnotize him. So that he’ll assassinate his future father-in-law on his wedding day. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Why not just get one of the aerobics zombies to shoot him? Couldn’t say.

Did anyone actually edit this screenplay before it was committed to film?

Now, I may not be a comedy genius but I’ve got a pretty good idea that any film that starts off with a storyline as random and chaotic as this is always going to be built on bad foundations. And so it is with Going Berserk, a film as irrelevant and meaningless as it’s title. Comedy, at its core, isn’t funny unless the viewer sees realism in the situations. When a moron steps on a rake and smacks himself in the head, we laugh because we can understand how much that hurts. But when said moron steps on a rake and the rake says ouch and then steps on the moron’s toe and says ‘how do you like it, eh?’ – that’s not funny, that’s just silly. Going Berserk is a study in silly.

In the middle of this mess, Eugene Levy appears as an incompetent filmmaker who once had Candy’s lead character appear in a bad kung fu movie. What relevance this has to anything else in the film is totally beyond me but it does offer up a sequence where the film in question, Kung-Fu U, is shown to the audience. This five-minute montage brings more laughs than the rest of the film put together but it’s still not funny enough to warrant watching the rest of the film.

There’s no doubt that John Candy was a great comedic actor. There’s little doubt that Eugene Levy still is but if you put Sir Alec Guiness, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Anthony Hopkins in a Steven Seagal movie, chances are that as brilliant as those acting legends are, the movie’s still going to blow goats.

Going Berserk is what happens when people get funding for their movie before the movie is actually ready to start shooting. For a movie that’s supposed to be a comedy and is so filled with comedians, the comedy quotient is disturbingly low. In fact, for a movie that uses aerobics as one of the central plot points of the movie, there’s a disturbingly small amount of aerobics in the film. In fact… ah, to hell with it. Flick sucks.

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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6624&reviewer=1
originally posted: 01/03/03 19:12:34
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