Over at GabbingGeek, we do this annual thing called the “Year of Anticipation” where, set to post on New Years Day, we say how much we’re looking forward to whatever Geek (or otherwise) entertainment is coming along for the year. For two years in a row, my pal Watson “anticipated” this movie called The Comeback Trail. When I was putting the post together the first time, I was a bit baffled because it looked like the movie had already come out, but it maybe hadn’t? It had appeared at a film festival, and despite starring (among others) Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Tommy Lee Jones, I had no idea what the movie’s deal was. Watson added the entry for this year’s post, but what was this movie’s deal?
Well, it’s streaming on Paramount+ right now.
Small-time movie producer Max Barber (De Niro) needs a hit for his struggling studio. His last movie, an exploitation movie with a bunch of sexy nuns, has drawn massive backlash from the Catholic Church where protesters have apparently blocked every theater showing the movie across the country. That would be bad enough for Max and his nephew/sidekick Walter (Zach Braff), but Max borrowed a bunch of movie from movie-loving mobster Reggie Fontaine (Freeman). Max needs to pay Reggie back or else bad things will happen.
However, Max gets a rather awful idea after an accident on a set leads to the death of a major movie star. If Max needs money, then why not make a movie with a very old actor in the lead, and see to it the old timer dies in an “accident” so Max can collect the insurance money and pay off his debts? And what better actor is there for such a thing than the suicidal former cowboy star Duke Montana (Jones)? There’s just one problem: Duke stubbornly refuses to die. Everyone loves the old man, he keeps popping up after all kinds of rigged accidents gone wrong, and Max, well, he really needs the old codger to die.
I think the best way to describe this movie is to look at the fake trailer for the fake nunsploitation movie that Max made, and it says everything. The jokes are amusing enough, at least on paper, but nothing that I might not have seen somewhere else. I mean, I don’t think anyone has ever topped Tropic Thunder for funny fake movie trailers. The thing here is I feel like the movie is trying too hard while also not trying hard enough. Nuns-in-lingerie-welding-guns feels like something I have seen before even if I can’t think of any specific instance where I have.
That also more or less describes the rest of the movie. It feels familiar without giving off anything that strikes me as being all that good. Considering the cast, which also includes Eddie Griffin and Emile Hirsch, the whole movie just feels like something that should have been better than it was. The premise isn’t bad. The actors are generally reliable. The movie is very invested in a horse named Buttercup for some reason. But in the end, I can’t say there’s anything particularly noteworthy here. It’s, like, the epitome of the “meh” movie.
Grade: C
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