Movie Review: "Between Two Ferns: The Movie" Is a Lean, Mean Joke Machine

Celebrities being cruel to one another for an hour and change? Sold!

I have seen Between Two Ferns: The Movie, and I will watch it again, and, to be completely transparent, I’ve been skipping through its best bits on Netflix while writing this very review.

That is because—and I’d like to cash in what little esteem I have remaining to convey this with as much professional gravitas as I can muster—I laughed my ass off, and especially liked the bits where star Zach Galifianakis, playing an ego-crushed version of himself, fell over or got hurt.

Between Two Ferns, as a webseries and now as a Netflix motion picture (just like Roma!), is the perfect joke delivery system. It plants Galifianakis and a celebrity betwixt two shrubs, and for five minutes at a time allows Galifianakis to prod the celeb awkwardly. The celebs prod back too. (As President Barack Obama opined of The Hangover Part III: "It didn't work out very well, did it?" Hey, that’s actually pretty spicy for a guy who took two years to criticise President Donald Trump.)

After a full decade as a sporadic series of online instalments, Between Two Ferns graduates to feature length, though it barely warrants its subtitle. Between Two Ferns: For 82 Minutes would have sufficed. Writer-director Scott Aukerman (the godhead behind iconic improv podcast and TV series Comedy Bang Bang) gives Galifianakis a loosey-goosey plot to explain why he might need to hit the road and record ten episodes of his failed public access interview show in quick succession. It involves a coke-hounding Will Ferrell commanding Galifianakis to drive clicks to Funny or Die, with the reward of his very own primetime late night talk show. Sure, that counts as a narrative.

That’s not to say there’s not a lot of skill involved here. The irascible interviews are well paced, and Galifianakis’ clowning abilities—even in subtle moments, like when he checks his laptop while driving—are the work of comedic genius; a talent that has otherwise been buried in too many of his previous cinematic efforts. Aukerman also shows real promise as a filmmaker, contrasting the glaring high-def amateurishness of the interviews with the warm hues of Zach’s US travels. (He notes This Is Spinal Tap as an inspiration, but Steve Martin's picaresque The Jerk is a closer comparison.)

Of course, most viewers will just want the celebrity interactions, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, with Matthew McConaughey, Keanu Reeves, Brie Larson and Tiffany Haddish all gamely submitting to a grilling based on their public personas. (To poor Keanu: "On a scale of one to a hundred, how many words do you know?") But so many of the flick’s funniest moments come during the improvised bits that connect those chats, like Jon Hamm cheerfully signing autographs at a Kansas church because he’ll do anything; or Chrissy Teigen seducing Zach at a bar, and then her real-life husband, John Legend, cheerfully mad-dogging him before an intense post-coital interview.

And then there’s the hilarious supporting performance of Lauren Lapkus, a Comedy Bang Bang all-star who plays Zach’s long-suffering, ever-enthusiastic producer Carol Hunch. She joins him on his road trip mere weeks after a personal tragedy (as she offhandedly reveals) and still manages to book a frankly shocking number of huge guests. Fans of her podcast work will appreciate her bizarre digressions and improvisations, and be grateful she has more to do here than in Ferrell’s Holmes & Watson, where she was forced to remain deathly silent, like its entire audience.

Ryan Gaul and Jiavani Linayao come along for the ride too, as Zach’s camera and boom operators. There’s also an entire documentary crew who are ostensibly capturing the adventure for posterity, except Between Two Ferns: The Movie isn’t that mockumentary, which seems wasteful. If you want to keep poking holes, there are gaping crevasses in the motivation of Galifianakis’ character, and you have to make a big leap to buy that someone so disdainful of celebrities would want multiple talk shows. Should you find yourself wandering down that thought spiral, hopefully you’ll realise you’re questioning character motivation in a flick that would just rather you sit back and enjoy the sight of Galifianakis’ getting pepper-sprayed in the crotch. Priorities, people.

3.5/5

Between Two Ferns: The Movie is now streaming on Netflix.