The awful comedy movie Roger Ebert wished had never been made: “Nobody needs to see it”
The odd couple comedy and the mismatched buddy caper have been two of Hollywood’s favourite genres for decades, and with good reason. When they’re done right, there are few more enjoyable forms of onscreen escapism, but only when they’re done right. Roger Ebert watched a lot of them, and there was one he was adamant would have been much better off never existing in the first place.
It’s a basic setup that’s spawned a thousand pictures: Take two actors who occupy completely different ends of the personality spectrum, pair them up as characters who start as adversaries before developing a mutual appreciation that turns into friendship, drop them into an ever-escalating series of misadventures, and, theoretically, sit back and watch the money roll in.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work like that. For every Lethal Weapon, there’s a Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. For every Midnight Run, there’s a Theodore Rex. For every Hot Fuzz, there’s an RIPD. The success rate has been all over the shop, but Ebert knew exactly where 2005’s The Man landed.
On paper, the partnership of Samuel L Jackson and Eugene Levy had potential. Stars don’t come much more different, with the former’s natural charisma and effortless cool pitted against the latter’s neurotic nebbishness. Instead, it was awful, and director Les Mayfield’s cack-handed buddy flick was shunned by audiences and left to fall victim to a thoroughly deserved tanking.
As for Ebert, he couldn’t have been clearer: “The inescapable fact about The Man is that this movie is completely unnecessary,” he wrote in his review. “Nobody needed to make it, nobody needs to see it, Jackson and Levy are too successful to waste time with it. It plays less like a film than like a deal.”
For those who give a shit, which surely can’t be many, the plot follows the tried-and-trusted tropes. Jackson is the badass undercover cop on the hunt for the people who murdered his partner, only for Levy’s dentist to stumble into a case of mistaken identity that puts them in the crosshairs of ruthless arms dealers.
One small positive Ebert found was that The Man mercifully only ran for 79 minutes, although he did put that down to a combination of “thin material and mercy towards the audience by not stretching it any further than what is already at breaking point”. The downside of being a critic is that a lot of terrible films need to be watched, and this one left Ebert wondering why anyone decided it had to be made at all.
A miserable theatrical run and a Razzie nomination for Levy were all The Man had to show for it at the end of the day, making it hard to say Ebert was wrong. It lost money, was recognised by the awards show nobody wants to be associated with, faded from memory as soon as the credits started rolling, and there weren’t even that many people willing to watch it in the first place. What a mess.
