Two life long slackers from Queens, New York, Johnny and Kamal (Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed) have spent the past 20 years since their childhood friendship sponging off Johnny's long suffering mother Mrs. B. (Suzanne Shepherd) and making prank calls when not being fired from an ever increasing list of jobs. When the duo's smug childhood nemesis Brett Weir (James Lorinz) tells the two he's now working for mob boss Ernie Lazzaro (Alan Arkin) the two after a failed attempt to curry favor with Weir's name decide to crank call under the alias of "Frank Rizzo" a Chicago mob boss who convinces Lazzaro's crime family to take in Johnny and Kamal to lavish trappings, but the duo's antics soon spiral out of their control.
The Jerky Boys are a comedic duo consisting of Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, two childhood friends who during their time as unemployed construction workers produced a number of bootleg tapes of the two answering want ads or contacting random strangers while spouting ridiculous nonsense in silly voices. The bootlegs eventually found their way to shock jock Howard Stern who played the duo's on air and gave them the clout they needed to release their first self titled album The Jerky Boys in 1993 which eventually went platinum. Joe Roth then of Caravan Pictures came across the duo after listening to their tape brought in by then Caravan intern Johnathan Glickman and Roth loved the tape and signed the duo to a deal for a feature film believing the duo could be the 90s Cheech and Chong. The screenplay was co-written by Brennan and Ahmed with addition work done by James Melkonian and Rich Wilkes (the former also serving as director) who'd previously collaborated on The Stoned Age. Upon release the film underperformed as while the film opened at a not terrible third place in its opening weekend, the film very quickly dropped to ninth place the following weekend and was pulled from theaters after two weeks making only $7.6 million against an estimated $8 million budget. Critical reception wasn't much better with a number of critics such as Gene Siskel placing the film on their worst of lists. The Jerky Boys isn't the worst transition I've seen from comedian to film star, but the movie doesn't seem to understand why the tapes worked.
The biggest issue with the movie is the fact you have two comedians, John Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, who are known for their exaggerated voices and delivery of exaggerated nonsense that was bounced off against real-life people to genuine reaction. The big selling point of The Jerky Boys tapes was that these were real people being called and listening to their reactions at John and Kamal's nonsense and vulgarity helped to make them as funny and endearing as they were. In many ways you can see The Jerky Boys as a foundation for similar "man on the street" type reaction comedies like The Tom Green Show, Jackass, or the works of Sacha Baron Cohen. The movie basically strings together the duo's "best of" gags into a narrative with lines about "All my glasses and shoes" or the "Egyptian magician" now translated from the original prank call tapes into scripted and acted sections and it just doesn't work because John and Kamal are big exaggerated personalities and they're now playing against big exaggerated mafia stereotypes so the reaction isn't as funny as it was when the duo were calling actual people. When the movie was first announced, it was pretty much admitted they were going to write a movie around the Jerky Boys' crank calls, but the movie runs into problems with that and the mafia plot just doesn't work to their strengths as comedians and it's just a generic mistaken identity comedy.
The Jerky Boys: The Movie is the kind of failure you get when transitioning from one medium to another. While the unscripted reactions of real-life people made the Jerky Boys tapes endearing classics, The Jerky Boys: The Movie thinks the concept of the prank calls themselves were funny and simply takes oft quoted lines from the tapes and daisy chains them into a not particularly funny or interesting mafia farce. For Jerky Boys completionists only and even then there's better material from the duo.
The Jerky Boys are a comedic duo consisting of Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, two childhood friends who during their time as unemployed construction workers produced a number of bootleg tapes of the two answering want ads or contacting random strangers while spouting ridiculous nonsense in silly voices. The bootlegs eventually found their way to shock jock Howard Stern who played the duo's on air and gave them the clout they needed to release their first self titled album The Jerky Boys in 1993 which eventually went platinum. Joe Roth then of Caravan Pictures came across the duo after listening to their tape brought in by then Caravan intern Johnathan Glickman and Roth loved the tape and signed the duo to a deal for a feature film believing the duo could be the 90s Cheech and Chong. The screenplay was co-written by Brennan and Ahmed with addition work done by James Melkonian and Rich Wilkes (the former also serving as director) who'd previously collaborated on The Stoned Age. Upon release the film underperformed as while the film opened at a not terrible third place in its opening weekend, the film very quickly dropped to ninth place the following weekend and was pulled from theaters after two weeks making only $7.6 million against an estimated $8 million budget. Critical reception wasn't much better with a number of critics such as Gene Siskel placing the film on their worst of lists. The Jerky Boys isn't the worst transition I've seen from comedian to film star, but the movie doesn't seem to understand why the tapes worked.
The biggest issue with the movie is the fact you have two comedians, John Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, who are known for their exaggerated voices and delivery of exaggerated nonsense that was bounced off against real-life people to genuine reaction. The big selling point of The Jerky Boys tapes was that these were real people being called and listening to their reactions at John and Kamal's nonsense and vulgarity helped to make them as funny and endearing as they were. In many ways you can see The Jerky Boys as a foundation for similar "man on the street" type reaction comedies like The Tom Green Show, Jackass, or the works of Sacha Baron Cohen. The movie basically strings together the duo's "best of" gags into a narrative with lines about "All my glasses and shoes" or the "Egyptian magician" now translated from the original prank call tapes into scripted and acted sections and it just doesn't work because John and Kamal are big exaggerated personalities and they're now playing against big exaggerated mafia stereotypes so the reaction isn't as funny as it was when the duo were calling actual people. When the movie was first announced, it was pretty much admitted they were going to write a movie around the Jerky Boys' crank calls, but the movie runs into problems with that and the mafia plot just doesn't work to their strengths as comedians and it's just a generic mistaken identity comedy.
The Jerky Boys: The Movie is the kind of failure you get when transitioning from one medium to another. While the unscripted reactions of real-life people made the Jerky Boys tapes endearing classics, The Jerky Boys: The Movie thinks the concept of the prank calls themselves were funny and simply takes oft quoted lines from the tapes and daisy chains them into a not particularly funny or interesting mafia farce. For Jerky Boys completionists only and even then there's better material from the duo.