The major downfall of Craig
Gillespie’s Mr. Woodcock is that it assumes that two good
halves will always tidily come together to form a satisfying
whole. It seems that the original intention of the filmmakers
here was to create a full-on comedy but, somewhere in the
process of putting it together, they realized that the humor
present wasn’t able to carry the entire film. To compensate,
director Gillespie and writers Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert
decided to throw an equally-unstable amount of drama into the
picture. The end-product isn’t quite as uninspired as what
might’ve resulted had Mr. Woodcock limited itself to
tackling one genre, but it doesn’t exactly make for a
stimulating motion picture, either. In other words: the film
earns a few points for ending up an interesting failure rather
than a boring or painful one, but isn’t worth seeking out
because it’s still a failure nonetheless.
Billy Bob
Thorton plays the title character, a hard-assed middle-school
gym teacher not unlike his binge-drinking Santa-impersonator in
Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa or his foul-mouthed coach in
Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears remake. In the opening
scene of the film, we observe the cruel and unusual Mr. Woodcock
torture his out-of-shape students by engaging in ridiculous
teaching practices, such as making an asthmatic boy run laps to
punish him for wheezing. Among the kids in his class is young
John Farley, a chubby nerd whose gym clothes were nabbed by
bullies. Woodcock observes that Farley is not dressed in the
proper attire for “training,” and disciplines Farley by forcing
him to change into a loner-uniform in front of the class. Farley
resists, and Woodcock responds by thrusting the helpless
seventh-grader onto the school’s pull-up bar to perform a
workout he couldn’t possibly carry out given his weight.
Fast-forward
about fifteen years, and Farley (Seann William Scott) has
established himself as our protagonist. Farley is now a likable,
fit guy– and he’s just written a self-help book called
Letting Go about how to deal with repressed memories from
one’s past, a process that he has undergone concerning those of
his that involve Mr. Woodcock. On a book tour, he makes a
surprise stop home to see his mom (Susan Sarandon), only to have
his worst nightmare brought to life: she’s now dating Mr.
Woodcock. This stunning realization—along with the Happy
Couple’s later engagement in the movie—shows to Farley an
endless supply of emotions that the words in his book would
highly disapprove of.
If that sounds
like a lot of plot for a silly comedy to handle, it is. Mr.
Woodcock’s sense of humor clearly didn’t offer the
screenwriters enough story to hold the picture afloat for ninety
minutes, and they completely overcompensate for this by adding
way too much plot to the equation. Doing so only lends to a
vicious cycle: the addition of external-material dilutes the
comedy itself. The central problem here, really, is that the
only thing funny about the movie is Thorton’s cruel, dark shtick
as Woodcock. (And not even this is hilarious, given the
actor has played virtually the same character twice before.) Had
Scott, Sarandon, or the screenplay offered anything in the way
of jokes or cleverness, then perhaps the film wouldn’t have
needed to get so complicated in order to fill a feature-length
running-time. The aforementioned blend between comedy and drama
leads to a strangely eerie and ultimately confused tone, which
will more often have viewers cringing at the movie’s black
comedy than embracing it within the context of each situation
present. While entirely harmless at its core, Mr. Woodcock
represents a hopeless motion picture, too convoluted to
pleasantly divert the viewer and too half-baked to truly engross
them.