Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

The main problem with this movie ‘Wieners’, other than the movie itself which really wasn’t THAT bad, is the title. And the box cover art. I mean I don’t know anything about making movies and I certainly don’t know jack about marketing movies, but I gotta think that somewhere along the line somebody must of mentioned that ‘Wieners’ is an incredibly weak title for a movie. I dig the whole double entendre thing and all, our heroes are wieners selling wieners and then to have a ridiculous picture of Kenan Thompson dressed in faux ‘Fat Albert’ gear as the dominating force of your cover art… I don’t know marketing team. I’m going to go ahead and assume that there was a ‘no budging on title’ clause for the creators of this thing, not that a better title than ‘Wieners’ is rushing to my head right now. ‘Three men and a Hot Dog’ would’ve been better than ‘Wieners’, but the box cover art… There’s a reason that classic poster of ‘The Graduate’ has been copied over and over and over again, and since we’re not reinventing the wheel here, nothing really beats a camera shot through a woman’s open legs while three guys are looking up at her. They could even be holding wieners to help sell the whole wiener concept, which is obviously so important. But no, I have to look at Kenan Thompson, who’s my boy now… nothing but mad love… grinning like an idiot squirting mustard. ‘Wieners’ deserved better than that.

Anyways, our film starts on the set of the Dr. Dwayne show, yet another Dr. Phil parody stab, where Dr. Dwayne (Darrell Hammond) is counseling Joel (Fran Kranz) and convinces his girl to dump him on national television because Joel rents bowling shoes for a living and loves it. Months later and a total junk food eating wreck, Joel gets a visit from best buddy Ben (Zachary Levi) who tries to get him to bathe and get his life together, but best buddy number two Wyatt (Kenan Thompson) has a better plan. You see it’s Wyatt’s dream to work for some wiener manufacturer for some reason or another but he has been rejected every time he has applied. Now taking matters into his own hands, Wyatt has spent his savings on a big Wiener truck and is

going to travel across the land handing out free hotdogs so this company will know that he’s serious. Secondarily, he’s going to take his buddies with him so that when they reach Los Angeles Joel can kick Dr. Dwayne’s ass and get his manhood back. Makes sense to me.

Quicker than you can say ‘Road Trip’ our three heroes are off on their adventure. Among others, they meet a trio of incredibly violent and radical vegans (like there’s another kind), an incredibly amorous RV couple from Chicago, their super hot ex-sixth grade teacher (Jenny McCarthy), Circus freaks, pick pockets and former crazy Oakland Raider linebacker Bill Romanowski going Broke Back on us playing a gay cowboy. Actually Romo is probably still crazy, but he is a former linebacker. Of course along the trip our young adults will learn a lot about themselves and the value of friendship and yada yada yada.

I’ve have seen some really, really bad straight to DVD comedies lately and this simple fact does ‘Wieners’ a world of good in that by making me laugh on more than a couple of occasions, places it miles in front of the ‘Cougar Clubs’ and ‘The Foursomes’ of the world. Had I not seen these awful, awful, awful alleged comedies before watching Wieners chances are I’d be more upset at director Mark Steilen and his crew for his creation, not that ‘Wieners’ certainly isn’t the second coming of the ‘Naked Gun’ or anything but it did have its moments. As is the case with most comedies of this sort, at least the ones that halfway work, the jokes are hit and miss with misses probably out numbering the hits, but the hits were decent enough for me to at least say that this movie qualifies as being funny. Judging by what I was watching, I’d also venture to say that most of the funnier parts were probably of the unscripted variety.

Director Steilen certainly had a cast of veteran actors to work with in Kranz, Thompson, and Levi, though all relatively young, have been working like forever. Especially Kenan Thompson who’s been acting since he was skinny. It must be mentioned however that he totally played his boy Kel Mitchell in that he didn’t even give brotherman a walk on part. Wassup with that? Regardless, the veteran cast, including Jenny McCarthy in a glorified cameo and Darrell Hammond did what they did and seemed to have a good time doing it and the filmmakers also tossed in a few pair of completely unnecessarily gratuitous boobs just to make sure this got an R-rating.

I know I’ve said it before that ‘I’ve seen worse’ isn’t a glorious recommendation for anything, but truthfully, I’ve seen way worse than ‘Wieners’. If you can get past the box cover art which may bring back some really bad memories of ‘Good Burger’, ‘Wieners’ isn’t a complete waste of time. I’ve seen worse.