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Andy Samberg is at his best when he’s being silly. One could say he shares more genomes with Donald Duck than Liam Neeson. His Digital Shorts are usually one-off jokes that get extend to full absurdity which can be used to fill three to five minutes. I have never been a fan of song comedy – it always felt like a cheap way to allow you to repeat the same joke over and over again. Nevertheless, the Lonely Island (Samberg’s comedy trio troupe with Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer) skits always got a smile out of me, as they would amplify the joke so that it didn’t get stale over time. All of this though leads to a pressing question, how can they take this style and make a feature length film with it? Their first attempt was HOT ROD, which tanked at the box office but has become a sort of cult comedy hit over time. The newest big screen effort from Lonely Island is POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING, a parody of the recent pop star “documentary” films like Justin Bieber’s NEVER SAY NEVER.
The plot follows Andy Samberg as Connor Friel more commonly known as Popstar “Connor4Real” as he releases his second full-length album and deals with its unpopularity. After rising to stardom as a part of the boy band Style Boyz, played partly by fellow Lonely Island members and directors of this film Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, he decides he can achieve more on his own. He puts Owen (Taccone) in the backseat as his DJ, though Lawrence (Schaffer) refuses and goes off to become a farmer. Over the rest of the story, Conner must learn to control his ego and remember where he came from in order to go further and regain his popularity.
IF the plot sounds trite to you that’s because it is, but that also isn’t the point of the movie. For the first two acts the story serves as a train rail that we follow while really looking outward at the crazy amount of jokes and guest stars – Justin Timberlake playing a shy ignored chef while Samberg acts as an out control popstar is fantastic. The songs are all, with one exception, ridiculous and hilarious.
It’s hard to tell the difference between the ‘supposed to extremely successful’ and ‘supposed to be awful’ songs because they are all in actuality awful, but that was the smart move. There is nothing funny about a well-produced good song, and in all likelihood they wouldn’t have pulled it off well. The only failed song of the bunch is the climactic comeback tune, which is a piece about mind-blowing ideas that can come from any source. The joke of the song is supposed to be the extremely dumb ideas of the lyrics, but only a couple of them ever land as funny.
In fact the last two acts of the movie get extremely bogged down by plot. The joke-per-scene ratio just falls dramatically, and we sit and watch the Lonely Island trio become friends again without much to laugh at. It acts as if the story is something remarkable to be watching, when we’ve barely been paying attention to it. If I had to recommend this movie to someone I would suggest watching the first two thirds through and through, and then fast forwarding through the last third until they see a cameo, filling in the rest as they go.
Nevertheless Samberg, Taccone and Schaffer produce a truly funny mockumentary. The life of boy band stars is low hanging fruit, but they never spend too much time making fun of stars in total, focusing mostly on Samberg’s personal antics, and as long as he’s the one being ridiculous and over the top, there is fun to be had.
