Directed by Charlie Day, written by Charlie Day, and starring Charlie Day, Fool’s Paradise is a foolish, aggressively unfunny comedy. Dr. Ken Jeong, Kate Beckinsale, Glenn Howerton, Adrien Brody, Ray Liotta, and Jason Sudeikis co-star in a barely stitched together parade of improvised bits that vaguely cohere into a story about a mental health patient (Day) who gets injected into the Hollywood system when a producer (Liotta) discovers that he looks like a famous but difficult movie star.
Many of the plot points are obviously improv gone wrong and too far, and as a result, the plot is totally incoherent. Moments fail to connect either to the previous beats of the story or repeat the same schtick as the last scene. The movie that the main character is recruited to make gets lost in the shuffle of other bits, and I lost count of the number of scenes of Jeong’s character screaming about Day’s character being an “A-lister.”
Everything that’s good about Fool’s Paradise seems stolen from other, better movies. One moment with John Malkovich – the best scene in the movie and the scene that seems the most scripted – is a takeoff of Network (1976). As a whole, Fool’s Paradise was sold on the premise of Being There (1979) meets Bowfinger (1999), but it fails to understand any of the things that made those movies good.
Even the central performance by Charlie Day is a pale imitation of Charlie Chaplin. Every muscle on Chaplin’s face was focused on his character’s intention and communicating his character’s broadest emotion to the audience; Day is just twitching his face chaotically. It is not really Day’s fault, as he and Chaplin were trained differently, but the attempt falls so flat that it’s impossible to ignore the failure.
Fool’s Paradise would have been better if it had not been made. There is nothing redeemable about the movie, not even a few of its constituent parts, and while Day’s work in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is indeed impressive, nothing in Fool’s Paradise reflects that level of quality.
