I love this movie so much

Truly Dreadful Film

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Expected more

Hacks is supposed to be some sort of subversive look at the dark and hopeless underbelly of stand up comedy. All it actually is, however, is fairly funny, deliberately offensive and an example of how comedians have a weakness for mediocre improv.A mockumentary that focuses on the talent agency of Lucius Diamond (Glenn Rockowitz) and Baxter Hutz (David G. Cohen) and the desperately bad stand-up comics they book into a series of humiliatingly low rent gigs. There's an aggressively bad female comic and her anal husband/manager who really wishes he were the star; a foul-mouthed black comedian who happens to be an albino; a middle aged impressionist with a Catskills-era repertoire; a wheelchair bound observation comic who's every lame, confrontational observation starts with "What is it with…?"; and an "alternative" comic who does pseudo-Kaufmanesque performance art without understanding what he's doing.A lot of the humor in Hacks is not supposed to come from the comedians, because they suck. It's supposed to be funny to watch them be horrifically unfunny, no matter how hard they try, and you can get laughs out of that concept. Johnny Carson was a master at taking the silence after a joke that bombed and getting the audience to laugh at how bad it was. But Carson would only have to do that once or twice in a 5 to 10 minute monologue. Hacks is great evidence you really can't stretch that out over an entire movie. After a certain point, being unfunny just can't be funny, no matter how much you exaggerate it.There are some great jokes and great bits in the film, all in the guise of being too offensive or dark for people to laugh at. However, as a farm kid born and bred in rural Iowa, I really didn't find anything in the film that shocking. Dirty? Yep. Politically incorrect? You betcha. But offensive in the sense of "I can't believe someone would joke about that"? Nah. The people making this film sure thought they were being naughty, though. Maybe they were raised Amish.I suppose I could talk about how Hacks never really focuses on just what it's trying to say as a film or about how the story doesn't really build or go anywhere. But, except for trying to spend the last 3 minutes building up to an ending that doesn't really follow the first 80 minutes of the movie, Hacks isn't really about plot or character development or really making a statement. It's about a lot of comedians improv-ing their way through a series of basic scenes.I'd bet 5 bucks this is one of those films where there's not many jokes or much dialog written down. They come up with the characters, put them in a situation, turn and the camera and just go. Here's the thing about improv, though. It's very hard to do. And it's not just hard to do good improv. It's just as difficult to do mediocre improv and it's even just as much a challenge to do bad improv. Comedians are generally the only folks who really understand that, and it makes them poor judges of whether or not improv is actually funny. Comedians know that just getting through the scene, making it up as you go along and staying in character, is quite an accomplishment. But they seem to get so impressed by the simple performance of improv, that they can't appreciate that you can make it up as you go along and stay in character…and not be funny at all. There's too many scenes in Hacks where you can tell they're improv-ing, you can tell they're trying to be funny, you can tell they're close to actually being funny…but they never quite make it all the way.There are some genuine laughs in Hacks and it's short enough that the almost-but-not-really-funny stuff doesn't go on too long. So, if you're looking for something quick and dirty that will occasionally make you laugh out loud, try it out. But if you've got a short attention span or high standards for humor, give it a pass.

Okay, first of all, Mr. Director, you are NOT Christopher Guest. I can see where you were going with this, but unfortunately the end product was lackluster at best.Right off the bat: the packaging was incredibly misleading. There were no references to this being a "mockumentary," or fake in any way. We rented the DVD in the hopes we'd found an interesting and original documentary on the darker side of comedy. Boy were we surprised.The acting was okay, I suppose, but being a comic myself I just found most of this film excruciating to sit through. Just because you put actors on screen with lines that a bad comic might say, doesn't mean those very lines are then funny. This was by far one of the worst films I've seen in a long time.Now it did have some positives. A few of the lines / gags were funny, but by and large I found it impossible to sit through. I actually turned the film off before the end. I tried. I really did. But much like trying to slit my wrist with a spork, the going was slow and just too damned painful.Stay away from this movie.

I saw this film at the Orinda Film Festival and it did great with the inexperienced movie audience from Orinda. The film was not original, nearly a carbon-copy of previously released Christopher Guest Films. I mean the main character is a emulation of Corky St. Clair (Waiting for Guffman). The acting, however, was very impressive and the film itself is decent, but it isn't close to the creativity of a properly done film of this kind. Go see waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind.

I dont normally write reviews of things 'cause i don't want to waste the time, but after reading the first review of this film, i HAD to write to defend this movie. i saw the movie at sundace film festival in january. ohmigod - i have never laughed so much in my life. i went away from this film blown away at the kinds of things being done on such small budgets. i know the budget from this site anbd cant believe it. Hacks was beautifully shot, expertly performed, brilliantly edited and f*cking hilarious. and in an extremely intelligent way. i read the first guy's review and freaked. i agree that auple of parts (only two VERY small ones) were a bit long, but c'mon!! the movie was so quick paced - and the jokes and perfomances so funny, the slow parts were a nice break! and to suggest that things were done 'in poor taste' - PLEASE! the movie is a parody. if you really GET the joke, you understand that the film was intended to make fun of the self-righteous morons that run show business - even on the lowest rung of the ladder. i thought the movie was f-ing brilliant. you can tell that the people who made this film were very smart, clever individuals who unedrstand that just because you employ certain comedy devices, it doesn't necessarily make it 'low brow' as slower people might lead you to believe. anyway, the movie rocked and deserves to be in every friggin theater in the country. the cast of Hacks are all going to be household names very soon. mark my words. if you can catch this movie anywhere near you - i urge you to do so. you've never seen anything like it and probably never will again (unless these guys make another movie).