Disappointing comedy, even given the rather steep fall-off from Spinal Tap to Waiting for Guffman. Best in Show starts well enough, but the last half of the film abandons the characters we've met in the first half in favor of a pure dog-show mock documentary. In the second half, we see almost nothing except the dog show, plus Fred Willard as a clueless announcer making rather lame, and overbroad, jokes that do not match the comedic style of the rest of the film.
Fred Willard is a mystery to me. Apparently some very funny people think he is funny; but he is not. He turned in the least-plausible, most over-the-top and broad performance in Spinal Tap (as the Air Force Base Commander); he turns in a similar performance here, except it runs for 30 minutes rather than two.
Christopher Guest's performance disappoints greatly. He does a funny voice, and he seems a plausible character, but he doesn't say or do anything funny. His dog, a big bloodhound, is adorable, and I like the dog a lot, but shouldn't there be some jokes here, too?
The only funny stuff in the movie comes from the pairings of Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara -- he's a dweeb, she's his hot wife who's had "hundreds" of boyfriends, and she runs into half of them in the movie -- and Michael McKean and a guy who I think is named John Michael Higgins, playing a gay couple (McKean's the "Will," Higgins is the "Jack" and ergo the funny one).
Oh-- and Larry Miller shows up, as an ex-beau of O'Hara's, to again become the funniest thing in the whole frickin' movie. This guy is FUNNY. If he read a phone book, I would laugh.
But he's only in it for five minutes, and Levy and O'Hara and McKean and Higgins aren't in it for very much longer, and the movie is sporadically funny in the beginning and then only very sporadically funny in the second half.
Did I like it? It wasn't terrible. I like dogs and I didn't mind seeing a lot of cute dogs and learning about dog-shows. I sort of liked some of the characters. But then, I sort of expect a comedy to be funny, and this film just isn't terribly funny.
Just a note for Spinal Tap/Waiting for Guffman fans: Although ST is perhaps the best comedy in the last twenty years, it inexplicably includes a lot of bad jokes which diminish the film's overall genius. For example, ST and WFG featured a lot of really bad puns. Well, not a LOT, but they were real groaners. "Mime is money"? Not funny.
The trouble with BIS is that a lot of the jokes are easily recognizable as in the same mold as ST's jokes... or, rather, ST's bad jokes. BIS copies ST's unfunny jokes, while apparently unable to duplicate the brilliant stuff.
There is a character, for example, who literally has two left feet.
Mime is money.
