El Chupacabra

Hilarious 30% of the time

The biggest problem with Reno 911 was that it was too long. At only 80 minutes, that's no small complaint, but even with such a small slice, it felt overlong and a bit tired at times. Maybe I've become too sophisticated and don't understand the kind of humor that was being thrown at me, but some parts weren't very funny and these parts outnumbered the funny ones. 

Everything started out well. The scene with the chicken on the road way was a good introduction to this incompetent team of deputies. From there it was a string of hits and more frequently misses. I have seen an episode or two of the TV show of the same name and found them entertaining, but it made me realize the problem with their approach to comedy. The Reno 911 gang does a kind of character-centric improvisational sketch comedy that reminds me of throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing how much sticks. And that may just be a flaw, relying too much on improv in lieu of finely-tuned scripts. You have to waste a lot of film in the hopes that the editor can splice together enough footage to justify the price of a movie ticket.

By the end, it felt like there was only enough good material for at most 30 really funny minutes. In other words, this could have been one of the funniest episodes of the TV show, but was instead a mediocre feature length film. Because I do have a bit of a simple mind and found enough things funny, I feel I can recommend this movie to other simple minded people looking for some stupid fun. Reno 911 will fill that 80 minutes of that void, 40% of which will be entertaining.