I have enjoyed watching comedian Will Ferrell make a fool of himself since 1998, when I first saw him and Chris Kattan bobbing their heads to rave music in A Night at the Roxbury. In fact, when I watched Ben Stiller's sendup of male models, Zoolander in 2001, it irked me that Ferrell, the film's bad guy, did not get as much screen time as I would have wanted him to have. As it turns out, I needn't have waited very long for Ferrell's star to take off; two years later he made quite a splash in Old School, and later that year starred in his first bona fide blockbuster, Jon Favreau's Elf.
Nine years later, Will Ferrell has treated moviegoers to dollops of his deliciously irreverent, sometimes borderline distasteful humor in several movies, such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Blades of Glory, among others, and this year, he's at it again with the political farce The Campaign. This time, he's brought Zach Galifianikis ( of The Hangover movies) along for the ride.
Ferrell plays Cam Brady, the Congressman of a district in North Carolina who has been in office for so long he is about to enter his fifth term unopposed. When he leaves a somewhat salacious phone message intended for his mistress on the wrong answering machine his popularity plummets, prompting corrupt power brokers Glen and Wade Motch (played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd) to move to replace him with a new candidate, one they feel they can bend to their will, especially for the purpose of approving legislation involving the illegal sale of the district to China. They end up choosing Marty Huggins (Galifianikis) the effeminate son of one of their associates Raymond Huggins (Brian Cox). Marty runs a tour of his small town and is excited to run for Congress as he feels he has a lot to offer his district, which he describes as "a mess." Unfortunately, however, seasoned politician that Brady is, he is not about to make it easy for Marty. The Motch brothers, to give Marty a bit of an edge, hire a campaign manager every bit as unethical and ruthless as they are named Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott), and the game, as they say, is on.
For me the funniest thing about Will Ferrell movies, especially the R-rated ones, is how the jokes, while they sometimes push the envelope of bad taste, are uniquely outrageous and sometimes totally random, like the unusual sexual request made by one of the characters in a pivotal scene as well as the infamous baby-punching scene which, thanks to the magic of computer-generated imagery, was actually shown. Some scenes are certainly funnier than others, but it's the willingness of Ferrell and his collaborators to go out on a creative limb in the name of their art that makes me willing to reward them time and again. Galifianikis seems to recycle the effeminate, annoying character he played in Todd Phillips' Due Date (alongside Robert Downey, Jr.) here, but he works well with Ferrell and with the comic material he's been given. Film trivia buffs may be interested to know that this film, by the way, marks Ferrell's first collaboration with director Jay Roach since the Austin Powers movies, in which Ferrell had a minor bad guy role.
I was a little disappointed to see comedian Jason Sudeikis, who played Brady's campaign manager, basically playing what is essentially a "straight man" role or a foil to Ferrell's zany Brady, but McDermott's hilariously over-the-top Tim Wattley more than made up for wasting Sudeikis' comic talent. The supporting actors bring a lot to the table, too; I loved Karen Murayama as the Asian housekeeper paid by Raymond Huggins to speak with a Southern accent, and was happy to see Jack McBrayer of 30 Rock in a cameo appearance as the father of the family whose answering machine receives Brady's obscene phone call by mistake.
This isn't quite up there with my favorite Ferrell films Blades of Glory and Old School, but for me it's definitely a worthy addition to his library of outrageously rude comedies.
4/5
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