Hot Rod (2007)

Hot Rod arrives in 2007 as a Lonely Island production, which is to say a moped, a stepfather, and a young man convinced his late father worked for Evel Knievel. The plot turns on a fundraising stunt and an ailing heart, and the film regards neither with any gravity. That is the entire ambition on display. The film offers slapstick, non sequiturs, and a dance move borrowed from Footloose. The cultural ledger, audited closely, returns a clean page.

The cast includes Isla Fisher as Denise, a neighbor and love interest who joins the team and kisses the hero at the finish line, and the film has no further interest in her. Sissy Spacek plays the mother with a straight face, as Ebert noted, and Ian McShane plays the stepfather who beats Rod senseless every week. Race is not a subject. Sexuality is not a subject. The environment is not a subject. Money exists to be raised for a heart operation, and the corporate gigs Rod performs at are treated as a paycheck, not a villain. Rod himself is an accident-prone man-child with a dream, and the film diagnoses nothing.

There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where the audience is instructed on how to behave. The sincerity that critics admired is sincerity about jumping over fifteen school buses on a motorcycle. For a classification exercise of this kind, such a film is a rare specimen: a comedy that wants nothing except to be strange and loud and occasionally very stupid. We record the findings without complaint. The ledger stays empty, and there is something restful in that.