Beerfest (2006)
Directed by: Jay Chandrasekhar
Premise: A group of American drinkers train to represent their country at an international drinking competition.
What Works: The scenes at Beerfest are pretty funny and they play pretty successfully on European stereotypes. The German drinking team is particularly funny, although the accent humor runs dry pretty fast.
What Doesn’t: Overall Beerfest is just not very funny. The laughs are too labored and do not deliver very much bang for their buck. When the film attempts to be dirty or risqué in the vein of The 40 Year Old Virgin, it just comes off as lame. One of Beerfest’s key problems is that it does not get to the competition until the very end and then cuts this short. Instead, the film spends most of its time in the team’s training process, which is very unimaginative and filled with lame gags. The characters that make up the American team are very uninteresting. Even if they are going to be idiots, the characters need display some kind of charm or humanity as they do in Dodgeball, but Beerfest completely misses the boat dramatically.
Bottom Line: Beerfest is another poor effort from Broken Lizard, a “comedy team” that has a really tough time making anyone laugh. I hope that before their next film the team revises their strategy and takes some time to craft the film instead of assuming that the cleverness of the concept of their movie will substitute for actual humor.
Episode: #108 (September 3, 2006)