Nick Swardson Defends “Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star”

We still have almost 3 months left in the year, but a strong contender for Worst Film of the Year is "Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star" starring comedian Nick Swardson.  Swardson is known for a recurring role on "Reno 911" and his own show on Comedy Central.  As his first starring role in a feature film, many believed Swardson's future as a leading actor was riding on this.  For his sake, I hope it wasn't.

So far, there hasn't been a single positive review posted about the film.  The website Rotten Tomatoes gives a percentage rating to a movie based on number of positive reviews vs. number of reviews overall.  As I type this, "Bucky Larson" has a 0% rating, with no positive reviews out of 32 professional reviews.  Of the 8,500 Rotten Tomatoes user reviews, only 35% say they liked the movie.

During a recent interview with Split Sider, Swardson said that the movie didn't get any good reviews because reviewers didn't want to like the movie and they compared it to movies it shouldn't be compared to,

Bucky Larson was a very interesting experience because it was a small movie, it was small budget for Sony/Columbia, and, you know, it was out there.  It was a character nobody knew.  It wasn't a character from a show or from Saturday Night Live, you know what I mean?  It was one of those things where I was like, either people are going to buy this or not.  It's going to hit or miss, and it didn't really hit.  I think when it gets to DVD people will realize, oh, this wasn't as bad as we thought it was from the commercials.  To promote an R-rated movie, with commercials, with this character, it was just really, really hard.  It was hard to get the movie across to people.  The trailer in theaters was really tame because we couldn't show any of the insanity, and even if we did it, it would wouldn't hit because it had no context.  It was just really frustrating.  I knew the critics were going to bury us.  It was a softball.  They were waiting, waiting to hate that movie.  It's kind of funny that they get their rocks off on reviews like that.  They review The King's Speech, then they review Bucky Larson.

"Bucky Larson" was not screened for critics before its release, something a lot of people believe means that even the producers and studio know the film is bad.  The film opened at #15, with an average of only 8 people per theater.  After almost a month in theaters, "Bucky Larson" has only brought in $2.5 million, very short of its $10 million budget.  But Swardson mainly focused his rage towards the professional reviewers.

It's a lot of work and a lot of reviewers aren't going into that movie to like it.  They don't want to like it.  None of those reviewers was psyched to see Bucky Larson and laugh.  They go in with the mentality, f*** these guys for making another movie.  They go in there to kind of headhunt.  It makes me laugh because it's just so embarrassing.  It makes them look like such morons.  You can't review Avatar then review Bucky Larson.  Comedy is so subjective, you know what I mean?  To sit there and technically pick it apart is so stupid.  We've never made movies for critics, so we could give a f***.

At least for me, it would be a nice change of pace for a movie star/writer/director/etc. to come out and say, "Yeah... we screwed up with that movie.  It sucked.  My bad."

I'm looking in your direction George Lucas...