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Alright, so let me just confess right off the bat that perhaps against my better judgment and sense of decorum, I laughed A LOT during this movie. Yes, it’s pretty base, and yes, it goes straight for the scrotum, but the way in which Zach Galifiankis makes the humor work really went over well with my funny bone.

Galifiankis plays Marty Huggins (even the name makes me laugh), a simple, perennially cheerful, and admittedly effete family man who decides to run for local congressional office just to spite a bully. His opponent is the establishment guy Cam Brady (Will Ferrell) who is as douche baggy a guy you can possibly imagine in existence. He doesn’t come from the Tea Party: he comes from the Teat Party of North Carolina, where he serves as the eternal provider of backwoods nourishment to his constituents that frankly don’t (and probably can’t) know better.

Enter the two campaign managers that promise to make this a race to remember: there’s Mitch (Jason Sudekis) who works for Cam and Tim Wattley (the criminally handsome Dylan McDermott) who works for Marty Higgins. The two campaign managers bring the race to a dead heat before election day until the you-know-what REALLY hits the ceiling fan. The climax is crazy, sick, kooky, and more. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed it.

The best and biggest laughs belong in the first half of the film – whether or not you enjoy the second half’s antics will depend upon your predilection for Will Ferrell’s brand of juvenile humor. To be honest, his shtick is getting kind of old now that he’s pushing 50. There has to be something out there that’s just as funny as watching grown men behave like toddlers throwing tantrums, but Ferrell does make an attempt to make this movie slightly (and I mean very slightly) more urbane.

Ferrell is his usual middle aged brat self, but Galifiankis really owns the film. He plays Marty as a man who is everything he shouldn’t be: ambitious when he has no talent, married with kids when he’s probably gay, and full of sincere honesty when he’s really just a self-deluded opportunist. Sarah Palin would be proud.

Visit the film’s official website!

There’s a lot to admire in the fourth installment of the Bourne franchise, but then again, there’s a lot that’s left to be desired. The new film, which sees Jeremy Renner taking over the lead role played by Matt Damon in the original trilogy, begins where the climax left off in 2007′s The Bourne Ultimatum. It all makes perfect sense for the first half hour or so. And then things get muddled. Very muddled. So muddled that you wonder why they didn’t just split the movie into two separate halves as studios are so wont to do these days.

Aaron Cross (Renner) is scouted by CIA manager Eric Byer (Edward Norton) as an undercover operative to help carry out a mission that involves green and blue pills that are being used to kill an army of Bourne-like government killers. Cross has to swap the blue and green pills for the poisonous yellow ones. Of course, Cross himself is addicted to the blue and green pills. Hey, if James Bond can enjoy a martini every hour on the hour, why shouldn’t Cross have his own dependency issues?

Cross kidnaps a genetic scientist named Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) who knows how to make the pills and thus begins the globe-trotting adventure that goes from Chicago and New York to Seoul, Karachi, and Manila.

To be honest, there’s so much backstory here that to even try to explain the plot would take up more bandwidth than I am allowed by my editors. Suffice is to say, the action scenes are marvelously executed and the acting is first rate. It’s the sheer weight of the screenwriter’s ambitions that ultimately bogs down the film. The old adage that ‘less is more’ would certainly have helped them infinitely if applied to this franchise relaunch. I wonder if there will be another one.