Action Point
I seriously have no idea why I wanted to see this movie. That’s as plain as I can put it. I never watched “Jackass,” both on TV or in theatres, and I think I only watched “Bad Grandpa,” Johnny Knoxville’s spin-off film from 2013, because I needed a diversion after my father died, and even though, it didn’t really land with me. That makes my interest in seeing “Action Point,” which is not a “Jackass” film, but rather of the same ilk, kind of baffling, even to me. But, it looked just absurd enough to be entertaining in the same way “Bad Grandpa” was, so who knows?
I can say one thing that, I think, inspired me to watch this film, and it was because the setting for Knoxville’s latest rock ’em, sock ’em series of stunt mayhem was an amusement park. What I wasn’t sure about until the film came out, though, was that Knoxville was inspired by the real-life Action Park in New Jersey, which was notoriously unsafe, and apparently had at least six deaths occur there on top of other injuries for being unsafe. I feel like watching a documentary about that would have been more entertaining than “Action Point” was.
Knoxville stars as D.C. in this film, and it starts out with him as an old man watching his granddaughter, who has a broken leg, while D.C.’s daughter, “Boogie,” goes to a wedding. While he’s babysitting, he tells her the story of when he ran Action Point in 1979, and Boogie (played as a kid by Eleanor Worthington-Cox) came to spend the summer with him as he’s trying to keep the park from being shut down.
Five people, including Knoxville and “Beavis & Butthead” creator Mike Judge, have credits on the story that served the basis for the screenplay by John Altschuler & Dave Krinsky, although I can’t imagine much thought was given to the script beyond feeling the need to have a loose story structure for the stunts. This is basically snobs vs. slobs comedy writing, but the comedy aspect of it is very loosely defined. For a movie like this to work, the characters and stunts have to be hilarious in their timing and execution, and that is not the case in this film. As a fan of Buster Keaton, who did famously dangerous stunts in his heyday, I would really love to enjoy something like this, because there’s potential for a rollicking good time. Ironically, it’s the fact that the film spends too much time trying to tell a story, and not enough time doing crazy stunts, that this 85-minute film falls flat on its face.
