Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

Fresh and Exciting

Absolutely Fantastic

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Gentlemen Broncos is one of that movies written, acted, shot, edited and produced that bad to be almost unwatchable. It's bad in every aspect and the first time I saw it I couldn't find anything that could make me change opinion about it. Then, I watched it again, and again, and again; and I understood that what made me re-watched it every time was the fact it was junk. It has quickly became one of my best "trash" movies, and I still watch it every time I need to disconnect my head and just watch non-sense. Through all the movie it's very clear that the poor writing, acting, shooting and editing was intentional and that the movie has not to be taken seriously. So, my suggestion for you is to watch, but with the idea that you're watching rubbish and that you don't have to judge it with normal standard because this is not a normal movie.

Jared Hess and wife/producer Jerusha are truly mad geniuses! Hess's third movie after "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Nacho Libre," Gentlemen Broncos" qualifies as insanely hilarious. The challenge of dramatizing the subject of plagiarism would be considerable for anybody, but the Hess's have done an imaginative job of adapting it as an absurdist comedy of errors between two goofy sci-fi writers. Indeed, this trim 90-minute epic possesses an obvious high camp quality in its outlandish depiction of science fiction. Believe me, the narrative in the crazy sci-fi scenes is abysmal, so horribly bad that is emerges as funny. A popular sci-fi author of significant renown, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement of "HBO's Flight of the Conchords"), has lost his touch. Chevalier's publisher threatens to stop publishing him. At the Cletus Writers Camp, Chevalier plagiarizes a high school student's infantile but original manuscript that he got at a writers camp where he served as the chief spokesman. "Gentlemen Broncos" alternates the scenes of the conniving Chevalier touting his art and our high school protagonist, Benjamin (Michael Angarano of "Empire State"), with their versions of "Yeast Wars." These scenes are entertaining nonsense that resembles something out of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." The scene when Chevalier tries to bribe Benjamin at a book signing convention is memorable. When Hess isn't pitting Chevalier against Benjamin, he treats us to sensitive scenes of Benjamin and his deluded mother, Judith (Jennifer Coolidge of "American Pie"), who has dreams of selling a line of women's night garments. A subplot involving a possible romance interest for Benjamin and a wacky filmmaker, perhaps not unlike Hess, is amusing, too. Beware of the lowest-common denominator bowel humor especially projectile vomiting. "Gentleman Broncos" is not for everybody.

my little brother could've done better movie than this, completely non sense... not B grade move, not C grade move not even D... i'd call this a F movie, F for Fail. I started watching the movie and right on the first 10 minutes i noticed it was going to be a bad movie... should have listen to my intuition, turned out to be a lot worst than i imagine, i'm glad that i didn't pay for this, it was showing on TV, but i was amused how a pay TV channel would subject their viewer for some dodgy movie like this, specially on the premium movies channel. So if it's raining outside, you have a broken leg, nothing else to do, and you want to waste a few minutes of your life, don't watch this movie, go have a nap, or maybe watch a movie that you've already seen and like it a lot.

When Benjamin (an aspiring young science fiction author) attends a writers' workshop, his latest work is quickly lifted and re-imagined by two of his fellow campers. One, an obnoxious small-scale filmmaker, does so with the creator's blessing while the other, an established novelist, claims the work as his own. Written and directed by Jared Hess, also responsible for Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, this eccentric comedy lands somewhere in between the hypnotic success of the former and the disappointing shortfalls of the latter. The opening act is a real riot, with quirky, colorful characters stepping out of the wallpaper and amazing over- the-top visualizations of Benjamin's work that treat his hokey material with unmasked deference. But while those big screen interpretations of his hilariously awful novel bring the goods throughout the film (with competing visions from the two other writers' interpretations raising the bar) the primary storyline doesn't keep pace. The awkward, passionately inept cast doesn't quite have the charms of Napoleon or Pedro, (with the exception of Jermaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords, who's outstanding as selfish sci-fi plagiarist Ronald Chevalier) and there's a notable lack of a top-of-the-mountain moment that was so present in Dynamite's dance scene. It's a spiritual successor that had potential, but never completely rises to the moment.