Kyle Newman
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About halfway through Fanboys, a group of Star Wars geeks decides to make a detour during their road trip.
The cinematic equivalent of Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy — a project delayed so long that many began to doubt its actual existence — Fanboys is about a group of passionate Star Wars geeks who set off on a road trip to try to see the latest film in the series before anyone else.
Fanboys, a sweaty, strenuously overgeeked comedy about Star Wars obsessives (made by an unaffiliated team of filmmakers, but with Lucas’s blessing and original sound effects), is free advertising bordering on a b.j.
That's what a "Star Wars" geek asks his fellow true-believer buddies at the end of "Fanboys," as the obsessed brood prepares to watch the long-awaited prequel "The Phantom Menace" in 1999.
A geeky-buddy road-trip comedy that employs cultish devotion to the Star Wars mythology as its driving force, Fanboys doesn't have much of a reach – 20- and 30-something males raised on video games and sci-fi TV reruns, for whom fraternal hijinx in the wasteland of their high school and college years remain the high points in lives.
The low-budget movie, by and for "Star Wars" geeks, was originally set for a September release, but bitter fights between the filmmakers and the Weinstein Co., resulting in months of re-shoots, leave the integrity of the final cut in question.
There are some mild laughs to be had, and more than a few clever in-jokes and gags (loved the barbed reference to 1998's Harrison Ford/Anne Heche bomb "Six Days, Seven Nights"), but mostly "Fanboys" will leave you with a smile across your face for ninety minutes.
Much as Robert Zemeckis toyed with Beatlemania in "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" a generation ago, the wobbly new comedy "Fanboys," set in 1998, salutes Yoda worship and the fine line between ardor and breaking and entering.
Beyond comedic nitpicking, though, the movie whiffs on depicting fan culture; it gets the specs, rattling off Lucas-world trivia, dialogue, and sight gags aplenty (love the THX-1138 and Willow shout-outs), but not the specifics that would make the caricatures into humans.
It's a genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow" and an entire scene built around Harry Knowles, film fan and founder of the Web site Ain't it Cool News (aintitcoolnews.com).
A scene set inside the headquarters where the five pals drool over a room of George Lucas memorabilia ("Willow" even gets a shout-out) is played with just the right gentle, nostalgic touch, keying into how much of an impact movies, as with other forms of art, can have on people.
As they make their way to Texas to retrieve secret plans to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch (the year is 1998 and the quartet plan to break in to the compound to steal a rough cut of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace), Hutch (Dan Fogler) can’t resist the opportunity to pester some “Trekkies” at the fictional birthplace of Capt.
Since he’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, riffing on his Nick Fury role in “The Avengers,” we know Hardman is basically decent.
Naturally, Graeme and Clive are more than willing to help, turning "Paul" into a cross between "Escape to Witch Mountain" and 2008's " Fanboys ."
For all its dumbness, "Fanboys" is likely to please those to whom the term "scruffy nerf-herder" is immediately recognizable as an insult from "The Empire Strikes Back."
Jay and Silent Bob themselves (Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, looking vaguely embarrassed) also stop by, as do Carrie Fisher and William Shatner, who jokes about "Star Trek" fans (represented at their most demented by a pre-"Knocked Up" Seth Rogen in two separate roles).
Jay Baruchel, the skinny, pale, worried fellow who muttered "I shouldn't have gone in there" in "Knocked Up," fares best as the one they call Windows, who can't wait to meet the online girlfriend he got to know in a Jedi chat room.
Newman lazily recycles jokes from the likes of "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," including a jurist named Judge Reinhold, who in this movie is played not by Reinhold but by Billy Dee Williams.