Movie Reviews : A Lot Wrong With ‘The Wrong Guys’

The ads and trailers for “The Wrong Guys” (citywide) suggest a Cub Scout variation on “Police Academy”--but that isn’t quite accurate. Despite the requisite salvos of crude slapstick, broad characters and silly situations, director-co-writer Danny Bilson’s film is closer in spirit to “The Best of Times,” that underrated wish-fulfillment comedy whose subject was the attempt to reclaim your past, to relive your youth and this time do it right.

Would that “Wrong Guys” were as good. It’s almost a charming movie at times--with a winningly grizzled old dog, a memorably psychotic villain (John Goodman) and a nice surprise gag climax: the kind that ought to cap every errant Cub Scout’s worst nightmare. But it’s also too obvious, sitcom slick and shallow, full of drab, dusty exteriors and dustier gags.

The movie follows a reunion of Den No. 7--cherubic Scout leader Louie Anderson, neurotic dentist Richard Lewis, lecherous belt maker Richard Belzer, smoothie talk-show host Franklin Ajaye, and Malibu surf king Tim Thomerson--and it documents, in amiable but uninspired detail, their attempt to rescale the mountain that was the site of their most perilous youthful exploit. And it also shows their subsequent trials by fire, white water, squirrel and psycho escaped con (John Goodman). Its best moments are its sentimental ones: the reawakening of camaraderie between the Scout troop and their old tormentors--two beer-guzzling ruffian brothers who erupt from the past like stubbled Furies.

Most woundingly, there’s little sense of connection between these ex-Scouts. It’s no den of propinquity; they tend to act separately, like the stand-up comics they all are. The five main characters have the same names as the actors who play them and they tend to pull out their routines--all except Belzer, prevented by a PG rating from his verbal specialties. Some of it works: Anderson’s arrested development, Belzer’s sleaze-ball schmoozing. And some doesn’t, like Lewis’s kvetch act: He seems to be doing Woody Allen, with improper breath control. In the end, rubbing all these shticks together, Bilson can’t make a blaze. Occasionally likable--but minor, unsurprising, with more misses than hits--”The Wrong Guys” is, too often, the wrong movie.