Customer Reviews

The Onion Movie

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

The Good Things
*A great, varied assortment of comedic sketches that makes fun of many different aspects of modern-day society, culture, and politics. Topics include such issues as terrorism, sexuality in pop music, corporate greed, and so on.
*A few good parodies (most prominently, Steven Segal parodying himself!).
*Also a good number of original sketches.
*A few funny pieces of self-parody (ie, the scenes where film critics gather around and rate the movie).
*There is a very slight story arc that ties in many of the sktis together into a bizzare finale, and ultimately presents some major themes about journalistic ethics and corporate greed (although these themes are not very strongly developed).

The Bad Things
*No characters to develop, no story to tell (but hey, it's sketch comedy, so who cares?).

The Questionable Things
*A fair amount of perversity. Expect a lot of swear words and a little bit of graphicness. Some may find it too crude, but I think it's just right.
*Quite a bit of racey humor.

This eighty-minute collection of skits is probably the funniest thing I have seen in a while. The comedy is great, and presents enough satire to make it somewhat thoughtful. There is some sickness to some of it, but it's nowhere near as bad as some other comedies out there (like "Meet the Spartans" or the "Scary Movie" series). It may not be as funny as the Onion website, but I would say that this is comparable to "Saturday Night Live," "Robot Chicken," or Monty Python's "Meaning of Life."

The disc has okay video and sound quality. It has ten minutes of deleted scenes (which are really good) and outtakes.

This movie is really really funny. It's not "the greatest thing ever made" but it's still pretty damned hilarious. It's a great parody. I rented it hoping it was exactly what it was: a variety of parodies with a plot mixed in. No, it's not the paper.........it's a movie based on the Onion style of viewing the world. If you have ever seen Kentucky Fried movie this will seem like an updated companion piece. You really need to go into watching this movie with these things in mind. It's just a good ride. The movie isn't high-brow humour that's meant to be the best in the world but you'll get a chuckle out of it. I've been waiting for this for a while since I saw a preview on another DVD I rented. I know all my friends who are ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) fans will love this and I am going to buy it so we can all watch it.

As a more thorough review has already been posted here, I'll keep it brief when I say that I was fully disappointed by this film. I'm a huge fan of the Onion newspaper and the Onion online, especially when I rushed out to rent this movie the first day it was available (good thing I didn't buy it). The trailer that has been circulating the internet for some time is hilarious, but captures the only good scenes from the entire feature. Most segments are long, redundant, and unfunny, and although they are tied together in the end, the movie is missing the charm that I have come to expect from the Onion's caliber of work. Overall, rent this DVD if you have to, but it's something that should remain on the shelves.

This movie is more like a 90 minute skit show tied together with the premise of a veteran newsman's ethics against his sellout coorporate company. It all builds and connects nicely at the end, even if it doesn't durring the movie itself. Its satire about news, music videos, and commercials. Because these are sketches / skits, its a mixed bag. Mostly involving either stereotypes, swerves or uncomfortable moments. Such as the r*pe mystery party or the handicap hockey player. Stereotypes like... well... use your imagination and typical Onion swerves like having a news story about a man's missing sock instead of the explosion outside. This is more a movie to watch with your friends and wonder huh? Then laugh amongst yourselves AT the movie than with it.

Bizarre!! But interesting. I find their books more interesting than this movie. But if you like irony and/or strange humor, you'll get a laugh or two from the movie. It is a nice departure from the typical hollywood fare.

America's Finest News Source makes for fantasatic entertaining print. Unfortunately, it didn't translate too well for the movie. There was some humor (a parody of Brittney Sprears and Steve Seagal doing a self-parody) but overall it didn't translate well to the screen. The subversive dark humor was there, but perhaps a little too much Leslie Nielsenesque humor with it.

The movie was 80 minutes long, and that was at least 20 minutes too much.

I first caught this movie in its cut, censored television viewing. I laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes. "How did I miss this movie?" I asked myself. "This is great!" So of course, I ordered the thing.

But to my shock, I discovered that the televised version is actually superior to the "Raw and Uncut" version. Not only was the televised version funnier, it appeared to be an entirely different movie! The scenes are arranged in different orders, and some of the skits are longer (to their detriment) or even completely different. It definitely affected the quality overall.

Several of the skits are absolutely hilarious and made me laugh until my stomach ached. Just check out Proteus the Invincible, or the racial stereotypes skit, or the skit where overcrowded prisons send prisoners to live with law-abiding American families. Much of what I love about the Onion--its irreverent humor, which lampoons everyone, regardless of belief, race, gender, what have you--remains on the mark.

The thing that ends up crippling this movie is the sex. It's everywhere. And it's not funny. It even goes so far as to be a complete turn-off. Whoever wrote The Onion Movie's script seems to have mistaken shocking material for humor. The only place where including it made sense to me was the "Britney Spears" gag, and that was overdone to the point of nausea.

By "shocking," let me just give one example: there is a cartoon of a terrorist engaging in a variety of sexual acts with his 72 virgins, where very little is left to the imagination. This isn't humor. This is the equivalent of a child leaping up and screaming the "F" word in a crowded school bus. Said child's not doing it to be funny; he's doing it to show how very edgy and mature he is. But of course, we know this child is not edgy or mature, he's just disgusting and needs to be kicked. And the same is true of The Onion Movie. It takes no skill to be pointlessly crude. If I wanted this kind of humor I could mosey on down to the local Wal-Mart and read bathroom walls, or log on to the Internet and visit a forum.

If this kind of humor were limited to one or two places, or were tamer, or were even shared in smaller doses, it would be tolerable. But it isn't any of these things. It appears randomly, sometimes in the middle of otherwise laugh-out-loud skits, and it holds nothing back, and it goes on forever. For example, the cartoon I just mentioned occurs in the middle of an instructional video for terrorists. The skit itself is hilarious. The erotic cartoon ends up destroying it. How on earth can I watch this with my friends and family? I can't! And that's half the fun of humor--sharing it with someone else, starting in-jokes, and the like!

At the end of the movie, I felt disgusting. The parts of the movie that were worth watching were hopelessly entangled with the smutty parts. Now I greatly regret spending anything on this DVD. It is simply unwatchable.

Good try, but this one totally misses the mark. The humor is offensive...not funny. The acting is horrendous. I wouldn't recommend this to any of my family members or friends. They'd think I was warped...no sense of humor...just warped. I trashed it. This onion definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

"The Onion Movie" follows the footsteps of comedy shorts dating back to the 1974 "The Groove Tube". The latter is quite dated and flat for current standards but the former is not much better. Aside from about 3 shorts, "The Onion Movie" is actually a disaster because of its generally ponderous nature. The duration of most of the shorts outlast their usefulness. The "Cockpuncher" skit, for example, gets very old and repetitive but the movie's executives are apparently trying to give Steven Seagal his fair exposure...bad decision. The result is the consistently dampened punchlines.

If you are wondering which movie of this genre can give you the most laughs, it falls in this order: "Kentucky Fried Movie", "The Onion Movie", and "The Groove Tube". Make no mistake. At least half of the "Kentucky Fried Movie" shorts are dated and fall flat but provided that you are old enough to understand some of the references in its parodies or you're pretty good with 70s trivia, you'll feel that your time was not completely wasted in vain.

Week after week after week, the writers at the Onion are able to unleash voluminous quantities of sharp political satire and biting social commentary in their online and print newspaper. But somehow the same crew needed five years to get a loosely-strung collection of MadTV-style sketches to the big (make that small) screen. This movie actually has a bit of useful plot, as veteran news anchor Norm Archer (Len Cariou) tries to stand up to corporate tie-ins during his newscasts, forced on him by young integrity-deficient hucksters in the home office.

The state of the news business in the real world, exemplified by Norm's lonely struggle here, is a ripe source of social and political commentary, and it's already been done in major movie productions like "The Insider." Here, this little plotline does get some room to roam, though most of the movie is built on short sketch segments starring little-known actors (except Steven Seagal and Michael Bolton playing themselves and badly in need of real gigs). The sketches are mostly based on Onion headlines mentioned by Norm during his newscasts, and most are straight from old editions of the online newspaper.

Reviewers seem to be arguing about the merits of the humor found in this film's comedy sketches, with disagreement over whether the incisive political satire blends well with the concurrent lowest-common-denominator perversity and cheesy pop culture references. Well that's the Onion for you, and the arguments over smarts vs. smut sure won't be resolved here. So the way to judge this film is on whether Norm's plotline and the various sketches are FUNNY. Some are hilarious but some just aren't. Some drive tired gags into the ground and a few are in really poor taste even for the Onion (e.g. the Alzheimer's march). We all know the Onion is hysterical for the thinking satire fan, so does the movie match up to the newspaper? Partially. But even some faithful Onion fans won't find this film to be worth the wait or the money. [~doomsdayer520~]