Lazer Team (2016)
Directed by Matt Hullum
Staring Burnie Burns, Gavin Free, Michael Jones, and Colton Dunn
Man, Rooster Teeth, you’ve come a long way from Blood Gulch. I can’t say I’ve followed you over the years, much to the disappointment of 14-year-old me. Sitting around the family computer, surrounded by friends, oh, how we laughed at the comical misadventures of the Red and Blue teams. Hell, I used the line “This doesn’t seem physically possible!” long after it grew stale and still refer to dating as “buying the cow.”
Caboose, Church, Sarge, Simmons, etc., had an impact on the formation of my funny bone bordering on parental negligence. Time took its toll, and as I matured, the idea of machinima soured. There was a huge burst of video game “parody” series in the early-mid 2000’s, and the entire idea of using video game characters to tell a wacky and zany story just felt trite (though retrospectively it was preferable to the modern wave of “react shocked and scream loudly when things jump out” style of video game “content”). Rooster Teeth never fell into the abyss of shit, high on its own success, but something in me made it impossible to follow the series any longer.
It seems that in the time that I have grown, so have they. Red Vs Blue has evolved into a sci-fi drama, and their live action content is surprisingly well done. My friends that like anime have even told me that RWBY is pretty good. They bought out ScrewAttack, which for a long time was my primary source of gaming news, so that’s pretty big. Like any content creator, not everything is a 10/10 hit, but they’ve been consistently putting out creative, original content for the last 12 years. In a market saturated with rip-offs and repeats, it’s an achievement.
The reason for this nostalgia trip/excessive elaboration is that Lazer Team is more than just Rooster Teeth’s first major motion picture. As a small company that started with a few friends making jokes about Halo, it is already a monumental achievement that they have made it this far. It’s a feather in their cap, a milestone on their long road to success that every internet hopeful one day dreams of traveling themselves. However, this isn’t just their story. This is also the story of YouTube Red.
With Lazer Team, YouTube Red is trying to throw their hat in the original content ring. Squaring off against against titans like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, Red hopes to add another $9.99 onto your month subscription budget. It’s a bold and perplexing move for a company whose business model has always been “free shit instantly,” and so far most of their programming aims to further capitalize off of their most popular stars. Most of their planned content is just “YouTube star does thing.” While I’m sure that adolescent girls are just dying to see how Lilly “Superwoman” Singh jump cutted and girl-powered her way into stardom, it’s not clear if anyone will buy it. Pre-teens fucking love watching PewDiePie pretend to be scared in a funny accent, but whether their parents will fork over ten bucks a month so they can watch him flail like an invalid in real world scenarios has yet to be seen.
Enter Lazer Team, one of Red’s flagship titles. Though a veritable who’s who of YouTube talent, it’s also a real movie. This isn’t built on the premise of watching your favorite YouTube star do stupid shit. Whereas YouTube personalities survive off of their fanbase returning week after week to absorb their content, a standalone feature has to draw in new and unfamiliar markets. It has to compel you to watch it beyond brand recognition to put asses in seats. If YouTube Red is going to make it as an original content creator and not just a subscription service for premium reaction to jump scares, Lazer Team is their best—and as of now only—shot at showing the world they can do it.
It’s quite a lot of pressure to put on a comedy made by a group of friends about shooting aliens with lasers. I don’t know if Lazer Team will ever escape the weight of its monumental burden. As a critic, I’m supposed to kind of ignore all of this background noise and just focus on the movie, which I shall in the next paragraph. As a fan and patron of the internet, it’s a fascinating linchpin moment for the future of the industry.
Which is why I’m proud to announce that Lazer Team was good. Given the budget, it was actually great. Given the history as a YouTube spawn project, it was incredible. As a feature length film I watched for the purposes of review, it was just good. There were a lot of weak spots, but it comes together well enough that by the end, I was rooting for the good guys, booing the bad guys, and laughing when I was supposed to. Good job, Rooster Teeth.
The biggest shortcoming of the film is the disparity in acting talent. Each of the four main characters have Rooster Teeth backgrounds, but not all command the screen with equal finesse. Herman (Colton Dunn) and Woody (Gavin Free) have both great screen presence and comedic timing, with Dunn in particular managing to sell me on some actual emotional depth during one of the film’s more dramatic revelations. Both actors could carry a scene. Add in Zach (Michael Jones), and you have a cast that plays off of each other naturally, delivering solid gags and memorable lines in a manner that matches even landmark comedies like The Hangover.
Then comes in Hagan (Burnie Burns), who has about three and a half Hayden Christensens worth of acting talent. This still puts him well below the six Hayden Christensens talent metric legally required to consider an actor good. At three and a half, he’s only a Christensen and a half above Rob Schneider, and a full two Christensens below Nicolas Cage in one of his off movies. It really bums me out to ride Burns so hard, since he founded Rooster Teeth and pioneered web video game comedy, but he is best left in the writer’s room. He stretched jokes to the point of ruination, and lacked the timing or tone to pull off the quicker gags. His “loser everyman hero” characterization felt forced, and the scant few times I did laugh were at his expense. He’s an incredibly talented creator, entrepreneur, and individual, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him, but he was outclassed in every scene.
The plot is initially pretty cookie-cutter: aliens threaten to invade earth, only one man and his super suit can stop it, said super suit gets plot-deviced onto our heroes, heroes must work together to save the day. Each of them gets a piece that both compliments their personality and magnifies a weakness, requiring personal growth to master. Herman gets super boots, but his lifetime of physical neglect makes him puke whenever he tries to use them. Woody gets a super intelligence helmet, but his natural idiocy keeps making the wrong decisions with incredible accuracy. Zach is the high school quarterback, whose now literal cannon arm reflects his metaphorical cannon arm, and he must learn control to master it. Hagan has a shield arm, which gives him the courage to defend his loved ones and deflect all that shit I threw at him in the previous paragraph. Together, they must combine their individual pieces to overcome a far greater foe. Think The Lost Vikings mixed with The Wizard of Oz with aliens and space lasers.
Reflective of their YouTube origins, the movie is at its best when quippy. The titular “Lazer Team” is named so when Zach posts a selfie on Facebook, making a jab at the common misspelling of “laser” and Facebook grammar in one go. Ha! Clever! I like that. I like it when they make fun of people’s spelling. When Woody starts talking in a British accent because that’s how dumb people think smart people sound, that was also funny. Good going guys! When Zach gets tazed for like, 45 seconds, that felt tired, but was fine. When Hagans yet again has a bad thing happen to him and no one respects him, I wasn’t laughing. The extended gags just didn’t work because they weren’t believable.
There’s also a good deal of physical comedy that crosses the borderline into juvenile and doesn’t look back until it hits arm farts on the playground. I’m not knocking nut shots, but there’s only so many times a dude can get hit in the balls, accidentally see balls, and have balls thrust in his face before I get bored. It all led up to a pretty epic alien nutshot though, so I’m inclined to give it a pass. Furthermore, the scene where they all put the suit on was just genius. They also used tasers just the right amount, which is an artform many have yet to master.
There’s some social commentary in here too, but it never dominates the movie or feels like a “message.” I read some other reviews that said that it was a lampoon of our modern technological age combined and the incompetence of the military, but saying that this movie was making some kind of statement is reading way too far into it. The self-awareness to make fun of trending and social media coverage was both smart and fun given the history, though it did come off as a bit smug at times. As for the incompetent military, it was more just its own comedic character, and served as a framework for a great supporting cast. Characters like Officer Vandenbloom and the medical staff ratchet the movie up another notch.
There are plenty of moments during Lazer Team where I wasn’t laughing, thinking, “My 12-year-old self would really like this.” After about thirty minutes of halfhearted chuckles, the movie got into its groove, and stayed there until the credits rolled. I never found myself cracking up, but I really cared about this motley band of misfits by the end. It kept a good pace of laughs throughout, with only a few low points that really rubbed me wrong. It’s a movie I’d be happy to watch again, which is something I almost never say. It’s a movie that despite all its flaws still managed to hook me in.
Your personal enjoyment is going to weigh heavily on how much you resonate with the humor. What it isn’t going to rely on in is how well you know the cast. It’s exactly what a real motion picture should rely on. It’ll be interesting to see in the coming years where YouTube Red goes, but if Lazer Team team is our benchmark, things are looking good.
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FIlm
Categorized:Reviews
