A Futile and Stupid Gesture (David Wain, 2018)

The name 'National Lampoon' may not mean much else to people outside America, apart from a string of low-brow comedies, beginning with the tiresome, overly venerated fratboy comedy Animal House until reaching the bottom of the barrel with National Lampoon's Vacation, which gave an unjustified living for the insufferably smug and charmless Chevy Chase through a series of execrable follow-ups. However, this story of the founder of the satirical magazine that started it all, Doug Kenney, at least shows that in the context of the stifling 1970s, there was some point to the enterprise: it was ahead of its time in terms of irreverence and crudeness but also downright surrealism and off-centre thinking, giving America a much-needed boot up its staid ass, as they say.
So, it's a shame that it can only serve as a pseudo-documentary and not actually entertain as a film, largely due to casting Will Forte, who, as we've seen from The Last Man on Earth TV series, is a comic actor of the school where being deliberately unfunny and irritating is seen as worthwhile humour. He is forced to tone it down a bit in the interests of there being a story to get through, but then this is also largely padded out by appearances from a host of actors representing other comic collaborators of the time, such as the aforementioned Chase and a host of other names from back then, most of whom have appeal that really doesn't travel outside the time or the culture. A futile and stupid gesture, indeed.

4/10