Some people wonder why I ever consider watching movies that I know will probably be bad and the answer is quite simple: look at the above banner. What that tells me is that I’m in for one or two laughs, either chuckles or belly aching, and then a ton of hot girls, potentially naked ones. That’s exactly what I’m looking for when my mind is burnt out after a long day of work and a week of seeing dramas…and I have no problem admitting it.
Dumbbells follows Chris Long (Brian Drolet), a depressed and frustrated ex-NCAA basketball star who, after a career ending injury, finds himself working at a failing gym and obsessively thinking about his shallow princess of an ex-girlfriend. One day he walks in to find that the gym has been purchased by the famous model Jack Guy (Hoyt Richards-who also co-wrote the film) and who plans to turn the business around through a reality show. After a rough start, Chris and Guy develop a relationship and are eager to get the business back on track and whip the other employees into shape until things take a turn for the worse. Cue Fabio and his beautiful hair, cult kidnappings, identity crises, Chris falling for Guy’s smoking hot niece (Taylor Cole), and both men facing their troubled past in order to make their future bright. This is Christopher Livingston’s new movie Dumbbells in a nutshell.
The one area of the film where the filmmakers certainly succeeded, and the initial reason why I watched the film, were the hot women. The leading ladies were beautiful, and I thought Taylor Cole actually gave a pretty good performance, but my thirst for hot women was quenched when the gym cheerleaders began prancing around the gym floor, shaking their booties and, at one point, running topless for no apparent reason. These cheerleaders served no purpose but to enhance the “reality show’s” profile but really it was just so guys could be distracted from the ridiculousness of the plot. It certainly worked on me for a bit.
There are a ton of cameos in the film but most of them seem pretty out of place and completely unnecessary. In fact, most of the cameos weren’t funny, were rather pointless, and could either have been cut or replaced with non-famous actors and the effects would have been the same. I’m specifically talking about any scene with Andy Milonakis and even the one with Tom Arnold.
Dumbbells isn’t a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s also not a terrible movie either. In fact, I was shocked that I found myself defending the out of control plot and subplots because, from a distance, the movie looks like a shotgun blast. When you think about it though, the reason I defended this crazy and off balanced movie is because the road to the cliché Hollywood ending is anything but normal. Usually when a new boss enters the picture to change things up at an establishment they become the enemy in the film (think Heavyweights), but that’s not the case with Dumbbells, in fact it becomes the opposite and feels oddly refreshing. Sure, Brian Drolet’s performance was amateur and came off as if he was mocking the camera the entire time but the chemistry between he and Hoyt Richards was really good and you could easily tell everyone was having fun making the picture.
Dumbbells is exactly the type of hit or miss b-rated “raunchy” comedy that one expects it to be, and in this case it was mostly a miss. I don’t think there were really any laugh out loud funny parts to this film, but there were certainly aspects I enjoyed that probably made me laugh on the inside. As I continue to critically hate on the film the immature male inside me is still completely fine with the fact that he watched this movie and doesn’t see it as any time wasted.
Rating: On the surface this is critically a crap film, but for any male looking for mindless entertainment this’ll do for one occasion (4.5/10)
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