A Year of Bad Movies # 34 — “Reno 911!: Miami”
Reno 911!: Miami — 2007
Metacritic score: 47 out of 100
Rotten Tomatoes score: 35 out of 100
IMDB score: 5.9 out of 10
I can’t blame “Reno 911!: Maimi”’s filmmakers for making a sub-standard theatrical adaptation of their hit TV show. The cards were, after all, stacked against them.
I wish Don Johnson had cameoed.
It takes real guts to release a theatrical version of a TV show while it is still on the air. At the same time, it takes real talent to pull it off successfully.
That’s not to say that the cats behind “Reno 911!” aren’t talented — because they are. In the end, though, their talent alone wasn’t enough to pull off a 90-minute version of their very funny TV show that retained the laugh-to-minute ratio of a standard 30-minute episode.
“Reno 911!,” for those uninitiated, is a spoof of “COPS,” the police reality show, that featured a cast of unhinged, socially inept police offers who patrolled the corrupt streets of Reno, NV.
In 2007, between seasons of the Comedy Central show, the cast and crew shot a feature-length version that saw Reno’s finest travel to Miami Beach for a police convention. The plot, involving a terrorist attack that incapacitates all of Miami’s police force, is really just a flimsy excuse to get the characters doing their usual shtick in a new, exotic location.
There are certainly a bunch of really funny jokes in the movie — unfortunately, they are spread thin over the film’s 84-minute running time.
If anything, watching “Reno 911: Miami” helps illustrate a very important lesson about spreading yourself too thin.
Inspirational sports movies have taught me that I should always reach for the stars if I want to succeed. Hollywood success stories are almost always an exercise in the excess. You rarely see a movie about a person who wins a minor victory — they’re always about people who push themselves to the limit, go in for all or nothing and come home a hero.
In reality, though, people rarely are faced with “all or nothing” situations. Most of the time, people encounter an end result that falls squarely in the win-some, loose-some category.
“Reno 911!” was the little basic cable show that could. Made with a small budget and a devoted crew, the show became an underground hit. Seeking to push itself further, it released a major motion picture version of itself in theaters across the world.
Critically and commercially, it failed — mostly.
The movie still found a connection with a devoted audience of fans, had three versions of the movie released on DVD and the show continued to run on television for another two years.
So, you see, it wasn’t a simple clear-cut matter of the show succeeding or bombing. It may not have been the success that it had hoped to be, but it wasn’t a total loss.
Wow … I’m not sure where I was going with this. I thought I started out talking about spreading yourself too thin but now I’m talking about something else entirely.
Maybe I’m spreading myself too thin with this project.
I realized the other day that by this time next year, I will have written over 400 pages about movies.
That’s almost 300,000 words.
As the year goes on, you should totally expect to read more of these types of blogs — where I really don’t say anything insightful or noteworthy. There is, after all, only so much to be said about bad movies.
