Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story review

Satirizing rock and roll is like shooting fish in a barrel: it makes too easy a target. Walk Hard takes the scatter shot approach, firing in all directions and though there's the occasional hit, overall the film is a miss. Writers Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow set about spoofing their favorite music films, from bio-pics to documentaries, making a shopping list of rock and roll clichés which they regurgitate throughout. But the joke soon wears thin and once it does, there's little else to sustain events.

Inevitably with Apatow involved, there is a high level of absurdity. He's shown with previous films such as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Talladega Nights: The Legend Of Ricky Bobby that his philosophy is the sillier the better. It's a tone established early on in Walk Hard with a distasteful spoof of Johnny Cash's tragic childhood. After Dewey Cox slices his more musically talented brother in half, he looks on in stunned horror at the legless torso of his brother who proceeds to tell Dewey that he's “got to be doubly great for both of them.”

The trade off for such stupidity is that it's hard to be invested in Cox (John C. Reilly) as a real person. Instead he is this ludicrous, chameleon figure who morphs his way through a long and turbulent career, during which there are comical nods to a whole litany of musical legends including Cash, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Brian Wilson. Each person and genre targeted provides the vocally adept Reilly the opportunity for a satirical song. The film's title coming from Cox's signature tune Walk Hard which is a send-up of Cash's I Walk The Line.

Inevitably the film draws comparisons with the far superior This Is Spinal Tap which is more acute in its observations and possesses a humanity lacking here. Reilly is engaging enough as the slightly dumb Cox, but it's a cartoonish character, one that is never convincing in any of the various guises he adopts. Director Jake Kasdan struggles to maintain a sense of cohesion. Instead Walk Hard resembles more a series of sketches that are loosely pasted together with sticky tape rather than purpose. Amble Weakly would make a more fitting title for Dewey Cox's story.

Kevin Murphy