Dookie 2: Mudbutt Boogaloo
🎶Wake me up, when this movie ends🎵
Green Day “remembers” that time they ALLEGEDLY* tricked The Mr. T Experience into thinking they could open for the East Bay Bad Boys on New Years Eve way back in the earliest 2000s, making a really old fashioned, and wildly out of touch, movie about the corny practical joke just so they could kick a bit more dirt in poor Dr. Frank’s eye .
I can imagine Billie Joe Armstrong massaging his hands with maniacal laughter, “So, you thought King Dork was going to be a movie? And now you are forever trapped in development hell? Mooohaaahaaa! Let us beat you toooo the punch again, sucka! That’ll teach you to hang up our pay phone.”
(*I’m the only one alleging this, it never happened except in my bored 1997 raddled brain. The movie is not really about tricking The Mr. T Experience. They don’t even get a much deserved mention anywhere in the movie. Which is odd, because if the faux-band leading Nimrods really was this into Green Day, basing their own band on that musical heritage, you’d think MTX would be the guitarist’s first favorite band.)
What a kick in the wrinkled old balls.
Watching this thing ker-chunk its way along, I grew more restless and agitated with each passing moment. Mostly from its relentless, geriatricaly generic roadtrip shenanigans rehashed from a thousand better teen coming-of-age comedies.
I particularly (dis)liked how each new scene transition kicked off with a Green Day song on the soundtrack that perfectly matched the emotional intensity presented on screen.
I really don’t know what Green Day was thinking.
This movie feels so outdated, we would have scoffed and shot booger-imbedded loogies at it back in 1993, when we first discovered Green Day back in college.
True punks like Sayer, who I remember laughing maniacally when he saw Green Day had made it to MTV, would have kicked this like a crushed Budweiser beer can, straight into a ditch.
Then he would have called the three leads a “bunch of wimps” before storming off.
This movie is so dorky.
And bad.
It’s the equivalent of your mom buying a pair of Doc Martins on deep discount at Ross Dress for Less thinking she’s Tré Coöl.
I usually love these dumb band movies. But this ain’t no Rock and Roll High School. And it barely licks the dirty Converse sneaker of Detroit Rock City. Even The Foo Fighters’ mediocre Studio 666 did it better, and that sloppy swish is bordering on being so bad it’s unwatchable.
In terms of cultural relevance?
Nimrods comes closest to 2002’s Highway, a forgotten straight-to-video dogturd-colored road trip dramedy that pairs Jake Gyllenhaal and Jared Leto as two Las Vegas losers who drive to Seattle for Kurdt Cobain’s vigil, only to get sidetracked by an Alligator Boy.
Remember that weird Nirvana movie? Don’t worry, neither do any of the characters in this whimsical farty fairytale who’d refuse to watch their own movie, groaning that it’s grandpa shit.
They wish they had an alligator boy.
If the characters themselves would scoff at the movie they’re in?
It’s a problem.
Maybe…Maybe…The seven year olds getting dragged to modern era Green Day shows by their wine chugging moms might get a modest kick out of the nerdy antics on display here.
But this thing is literally the warm peanut butter and jelly sandwich that has sat in their Auntie’s purse all day, fed to said children between the opening act and the main band taking the stage.
This is actually the second bad, straight-to-extra on an obscure box set movie Billie Joe Armstrong has made, following 2016’s Ordinary World, where he plays a former punk rocker going through a midlife crisis.
That kind of sums up the aura of Nimrods, as it too very much feels like the work of former punk rockers going through a midlife crisis, only they have enough money to make a couple of movies about it.
Want to know how lame this sun bleached VHS mockery is? The band loses its drummer and winds up at a small town hotel run by Fred Armison, desperate to find a replacement.
In my head, knowing Armisen is a truly talented punk drummer in real life, I think, ok, now I’m on board. They’re gonna get Fred to join their band as an out of touch, creepy old drummer who kicks ass behind the skins.
Right?
Suddenly I’m into it. And that idea is funny to me.
But nope.
Turns out Fred’s hotel manager is just around for a cameo. He’s some old creep with a human head in a jar. It’s an outlandish moment that breaks the lame reality of what we’ve seen so far. And it’s not funny or clever. It’s just a desperate bid to liven up the proceedings for a few seconds. There’s not even a call back to it.
Fred joining the band, being this sixty-year old dude playing with two high schoolers, is clever. The movie is not, at all. So of course it doesn’t do that.
It leaves us with this lingering thought about some old dude out there who has a human head in a jar, stashed away in a hotel closet.
Instead of anything new or interesting?
We get scenes like the band running out of money and joining a battle of the bands at a crowded bar in the middle of nowhere, where they win for playing a country song, handed the $500 cash prize before they even step off stage, despite the other bands in attendance.
So lame, the money is ripped right out of their hands for being too young. Gak. On to the next calamity.
Elements of this were stolen directly from Disney’s The Country Bears, which ripped it off from The Blues Brothers.
Ok, so the kids watching Nimrods have seen neither of those movies. Fair enough.
But come on, Green Day! Do better.
The whole third act, where our heroes finally get to the venue, feels like a more vanilla rehash of what happened in Detroit Rock City.
Green Day goes on stage, on time with no opening acts! The person that’s supposed to be in the bunny costume never turns up? There are fireworks over the venue in Downtown Los Angeles that look legit, and not a Mexican shit show?
Please!!! Movie!!! You’re killing me!!!
I’m kidding.
I actually kind of liked the end, complete with a Bobby Lee cameo.
McKenna Grace is so omnipresent right now, this is the second back-to-back movie I watched with her, and it was purely happenstance. She barely gets a pass. Honestly, she might be the best part of the whole movie.
Her and lead dork Mason Thames are like the Nordstrom Rack Tom Holland and Zendaya. I have a feeling this isn’t the last time we’ll see them together on screen. Unless they break up before September ends.
Can’t wait for the next go around!
Nimrods really is Dookie.
