Gentlemen Broncos is the third film by husband/wife duo Jared and Jerusha Hess. Yes, their names make them sound more like a brother/sister duo. In the movie a strange home-schooled teenager named Benjamin goes to a local writing convention and submits a science fiction/fantasy novel he wrote called Yeast Lords – The Bronco Years into a contest where the winner could get a book deal. His writing hero, science fiction writer Ronald Chevalier, is the keynote speaker at the convention and one of the judges of the contest. After he is told his most recent novel isn’t good enough to be published, Chevalier reads Benjamin’s story and decides to adapt it to suit his own writing style and submit it to his publisher as his own.
YAY :
- Throughout the film Sam Rockwell plays the title character in the stories, both Benjamin and Chevalier’s very different versions. The parts where he’s in the movie are easily the best. I really wish it focused more on Sam Rockwell playing these characters and just had little bits of the lives of Benjamin and Chevalier, and their ‘battle’ for authorship instead of the other way around. I think Rockwell must have owed someone a huge favor in order for him to say yes to this.
- While I basically hated most of this, I can appreciate how the story ended. Which is a very minimal ‘yay’.
NAY :
- Are people really this weird in real life? And if they are, do they usually congregate together? Running a site called never not a nerd I think I can say I’ve known some socially awkward people, but none of them have been this genuinely weird. Maybe it’s supposed to be confined to New Mexico or Utah or wherever this took place.
- It’s a shame a movie like this wasted the time of a good actor like Sam Rockwell. If he was nominated for acting awards for Moon I wouldn’t be surprised if him being in Gentlemen Broncos killed his chances.
- The use of sound in some scenes is RIDICULOUS. It doesn’t have to sound that wet and disgusting! That’s not funny.
- All the poop and vomit gags were way more gross than funny. A snake shits on a guys shoulder, the guy has rat poison mixed with his own poo in a prescription bottle, Benjamin dips darts in shit, Bronco pukes on his enemies, Benjamin pukes after a screening of the movie version of his book. So much puke and shit does not a funny movie make.
Don’t let the two Yay’s fool you, this is a very bad movie. I don’t recommend watching it. It’s a big waste of time with few to no laughs. It also reviewed so terribly in limited release that a planned nation-wide release of it was scrapped. If I wanted to sum it up in a few words I could say “It Sucks” or “Don’t watch this movie”. If you liked Napoleon Dynamite & Nacho Libre (Why?) this could be your thing. It could also make you retroactively hate those movies too. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
