The first half hour of Here Comes the Boom is so good moviegoers might be fooled into expecting something better than an obvious wish fulfillment fantasy so patently implausible it’s almost insulting. Sadly, those moviegoers would be wrong. Star, producer, and co-writer Kevin James creates a witty, confident everyman in the first act, only to sacrifice him to the pic’s demands for formula and sentimentality thereafter.
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...and, um, there's just one of him. Bear with me here: A slimmed-down Kevin James, who's actually looking kind of handsome here (or am I crazy?), plays a high school teacher who enters the octagon to raise cash as a mixed martial arts fighter. He's basically Joel Edgerton in last year's MMA pic Warrior, only — lucky for us — he's still Kevin James, so it's a broad comedy and not a gut-wrenching drama and instead of Tom Hardy he's got Salma Hayek to wrestle with. Sigh.
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I didn't make the rules, girls, but it appears that Kevin James has reached a point in his career where he can look back and say, "I'm like if Chris Farley had it together!" I'm going to get out this comparison's way and let the late SNL star and Zookeeper topliners' careers speak for themselves.
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