The Man

Clearly, Samuel L. Jackson has sold his soul. I don’t know how much money he received for starring in The Man, but I really hope that it’s enough to prevent him from ever needing to do a movie like this again.

The Man features a mismatched pair of men who must work together to take down an international guns dealer with “hilarious” results. Andy Fiddler (Eugene Levy) is a naïve and overly friendly dental supply salesman from Wisconsin, who travels to Detroit for a dental supply salesman conference. He finds himself in the wrong café at the wrong time, when a guns dealer casually strolls in and mistakes Andy for an interested gun buyer. Ha ha, what a doofus! The ATF agent investigating the gun dealer, Agent Vann (Samuel L. Jackson), is forced to abduct Andy and bully him into aiding the investigation by continuing with the transaction and setting the arms dealer up for an arrest.

Samuel L. Jackson plays his usual pissed off, threatening character, while Eugene Levy basically continues with his “Jim’s dad” role from American Pie. The filmmakers just sit back and assume that audiences will be rolling out of their seats with laughter at the mismatching of these two drastically opposite characters, so they don’t bother with a fleshed out plot. The pair endlessly drive around in Jackson’s car, with Eugene Levy talking nonstop about blah blah blah, while Jackson glares hatefully at him and everyone else in the movie (presumably annoyed that he’s in this movie in the first place—hey, the audience isn’t all that happy either, buddy!). Since people ostensibly only find Jackson funny when he’s angry and yelling obscenities and threats everywhere, he basically takes the Al Pacino route and yells at the top of his lungs for the entire duration of the film. He violently roughs up his snitches and is apparently not held to any standard of police conduct whatsoever, because...I dunno, he’s Samuel L. Jackson, he does what he wants!

I admit that I find Jackson funny when he’s angry and screaming, but the movie relies absolutely 100% on the interaction between Levy’s Midwestern schmuck persona and Jackson’s tough street cop character for the humor. This became clear when I realized that the entire movie was going to take place in Jackson’s car as the two drive around from location to location, “investigating” the arms dealer. The dialogue isn’t necessarily all that great, and it seemed like the filmmakers were stretched extremely thin in terms of plot development, even resorting to my favorite indicator of mediocrity: fart jokes--four times. There was even a cavity search involved no less. The rest of the time, Levy throws around random adages about happiness and god knows what, while Jackson shouts back inappropriate threats, at one point even saying, “I’m going to beat you like a runaway slave.”

Wow.

I did get a few smiles and even one chuckle out of The Man, and it was funny at one point to see Jackson being referred to as a “bitch,” but otherwise it was mostly a worthless two hours spent in the theater. The characters themselves are funny as an idea, but having them listlessly drive around in a car for two hours was not a good use of the actors’ time or abilities. It was definitely not a good use for my money either.