Popstar: Should Have Stopped Stopping

Moves from trite to clever, to dumb to fully tedious. As you’d expect from a full-blown Lonely Island Movie. The music is predictably the best part of it, but even that never hits the clever highs of what they did on SNL.

Above else, it is a mockumentary satirizing musical pop stars; yet it commits a criminal offense and shames the mockumentary genre that inspired it. After about twenty minutes or so, the mockumentary element becomes so needless and so poorly implemented that you honestly forget they’re still doing one as it becomes totally unnecessary to the central plot, and is totally lost in the narrative crossfire. For example, the interviews in the latter-half are more of the same and offer no insightful observations. Slowly revealing itself has overcooked plot device. A movie of this length probably would have either been a stronger one without it, or perhaps been best edited down to a 45-minute format. Because the filmmakers prove they are unable to stay fresh and consistent in a feature-lentgth format. We are instead left with a plight of epileptic editing and an offering of something neither intelligently written or funny as 7 Days in Hell (which I loved. You will also never see more cameos in a comedy than you do in Popstar. THE CAMEOS LITERALLY DON’T STOP. Almost single-handedly ruined movie cameos for good. Some are quite funny (more so the reveal of who’s in them), but they’re all pretty much doing variations of the same joke and which becomes utterly exhausting and redundant. By the end of the movie, they’re STILL at it, but the fun is completely foregone. Lots of poor directing decisions.

And also equally grating because sometimes you don’t know if a character that has been introduced is a one-of or is going to be recurring. Bill Hader for example looked like he was going to steal the whole thing, but after twenty minutes you realize he’s not coming back. You basically saw all of his scenes in the trailer. This further reveals its gluttonous appetite for debauchery.

The humor is silly and over-the-top than cleverly absurd. Most of the gags miss frequently, but I will give the film credit for two that had me laughing pretty hard. A long sequence involving party wolves is totally genius and saves a chunk of the movie, the other being a running gag satirizing TMZ had me in stitches. Spot-on casting! I know many were excited for this as I was, but I am pretty positive this will not turn out to be some comedy cult hit like Hot Rod. Ends up being misguidedly directed, unforgivably predictable and a rather uninspired tale of redemption. Stick to the red band trailer, or be left disappointed, because this is just a very watchable hot mess.