Pop­star: Nev­er Stop Nev­er Stopping

That thing when you’re watch­ing a com­e­dy movie and just wish­ing, hop­ing and pray­ing that this thing gets a whole lot fun­nier, and damn quick­ly. But then your eyes droop down­wards to your over­sized wrist­watch and you can see that its 87 minute run­time is tick­ing away, and the like­li­hood of things perk­ing up to any tru­ly sat­is­fy­ing degree becomes more remote. In the spir­it of the clas­sic dis­pos­able pop song, this fish-in-a-bar­rel parody/​satire of the mod­ern preen­ing mat­inée idol burns semi-bright­ly for a short time before fiz­zling out to less than nothing.

The under­achiev­ing project is the brain­child of the Amer­i­can musical/​comedy troupe known as The Lone­ly Island, whose line-up includes Andy Sam­berg (the star), Jor­ma Tac­cone (co-star, co-direc­tor) and Aki­va Schaf­fer (co-star, co-direc­tor). The team are known for their com­e­dy albums, and films such as Hot Rod and McGru­ber. On the evi­dence of their exist­ing cor­pus, these are real­ly fun­ny guys who find it easy to do what they do. They are up to the minute with their ref­er­ences, and are game for going all-out to secure the laugh.

And yet, Pop­star just con­stant­ly falls over itself, nev­er quite mak­ing the con­nec­tion need­ed to con­vert the mild tit­ter into the full-blown bel­ly laugh. Sam­berg plays Conner4Real, a crude extrap­o­la­tion of Justins Bieber and Tim­ber­lake who exists as the ulti­mate, mul­ti-plat­form pop per­former. He’s rich, dumb, brash and the well-mean­ing pol­i­tics of his music are always offen­sive on a sub­tex­tu­al lev­el. The film traces his arc from the heady heights of com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess, to the dol­drums and his even­tu­al artis­tic recon­nec­tion with the boy­band from which he grad­u­at­ed, The Style Boyz.

Maybe the film’s cre­ative pover­ty is the result of hav­ing to work too fast – know­ing that the half-life of the ref­er­ences is so swift, that this whole enter­prise has to hit a tiny win­dow to remain cul­tur­al­ly rel­e­vant. It like watch­ing some­thing that’s dying before your eyes. The film picks and crops from This Is Spinal Tap, but the Lone­ly Island crew some­times can’t see the com­ic boun­ty that sits before them, opt­ing more often to churn out gags than tak­ing this tat­tooed grotesque at face val­ue. The fun­ny thing about Spinal Tap is that there aren’t any jokes. This one packs them in wall-to-wall, and the large major­i­ty are poor or slop­py or obvi­ous. In fact, when the biggest laugh of your entire movie is a Ringo Starr ad-lib, you know it’s time to go back and hit that draw­ing board real hard.