A Farsa dos Pingüins

This extremely minimal production yarn might be an embarrassing excuse for a mockumentery, but is not the completely useless piece of celluloid trash that some are making it out to be. Keeping in the stoner-addled tradition of things in fact, one may even squeeze off a few scatological belly laughs in the otherwise depressingly low-brow, low budget affair. Apparently it boils down to this: Writer/Director Bob Saget has a lot of friends in Hollywood. They may not all be on top of their game, many even out of the limelight for some time, but a common friend indeed they have with their oft-ridiculed, former television dork dad.

What Saget gets to exploit out of this is a plethora of B-listers, which makes for an impressive cast on paper….but do not be fooled. On top of the disengaging sound quality which reeks of home studio, almost all of the frequent one line cameos done by celebrities are so apathetically subdued that one cannot help but think most of these people are phoning in a favor to an old Hollywood friend, with absolutely no intention on getting any attention in this project; who can blame them? Even at 80 minutes, relying on a low grade stash of penguin stock footage in order to manipulate a crude plot into this joke must have sounded drastically unappealing to most participants.

Thankfully a few of Saget's crew actually rise to the occasion, that is to say that they do not let their hubris get in the way of embracing the full-on stupidity of the project. It is in those low-fi moments of tasteless class that a few voice actors and the rancid production actually get to shine in it's context. Samuel L. Jackson, as the narrator was an excellent choice, although even his central dialog feels like his head is somewhere else (to the scripts credit, they actually throw in a joke to echo this sentiment). The only other voice actors that make an earnest contribution to this goof are Lewis Black (who thankfully had a large role) and Tracey Morgan, making all other voice actors seem completely indifferent. For the few genuinely hilarious moments that reached further then this trite March of the Penguins farce, I am unexpectedly happy for, but for a majority of screen time, viewers need either be indulging their chemical dependencies, or mocking aloud with friends in order to receive anything special out of this shell of a movie.