Corky Romano

Directed by Rob Pritts

(Chris Kattan, Vinessa Shaw, Peter Falk, Matthew Glave)

Rated: PG13

Corky Romano has a scene where veterinarian/FBI agent/mobster’s son Corky (Chris Kattan) wrestles with a DEA German Shepherd over a kilo of cocaine. When the bag bursts, a cloud of coke is inhaled by the heavy breathers and, complete with digitally enlarged eyes, both dog and man get lit. Kattan then spastically jerks and stumbles through the next portion of the film.

Then there is another scene where a gang of skinheads clamp gator clips to Corky’s nipples, send an electric charge through him and, complete with a digitally drawn flame, start a nipple on fire. Again, Kattan spastically jerks and stumbles through more scenes.

Come to think of it, there isn’t a moment in Corky Romano that Kattan doesn’t appear to be electrocuted or drugged. It’s not merely that it isn’t funny, which honestly, it rarely is, it just gets so old. The writers/director crew of David Garrett, Jason Ward and Rob Pritts might as well have gone all-out in gimping Kattan’s ability and given Corky Tourette’s syndrome.

With Romano, Kattan joins the ranks of former SNL members who have proven their depth with film-scene larceny in supporting roles (The House on Haunted Hill), but whose skit-oriented characters cannot cut the mustard with the weighty scripts of leads in their hands.

The problem in films like Romano is that they are put together from the inside out, top to bottom, all ass backwards. The writer/director team builds the plot around two or three pants-wetting sequences instead of allowing situational humor to fall into its place in the story. Pritts gets lost in his own tangled plot mess trying to web together Romano‘s three scenes of hilarity: Kattan in a Girl Scout uniform, agent Brick’s (Matthew Glave) breakdown about his exclusion from the group and a prolonged three minutes of Kattan’s writhing face as he strains to inflict true justice into the faces of criminals by breaking wind. This is hardly enough to make Romano worth an hour and a half of your day.

-Michael Goller

Corky Romano opens today in theaters nationwide.