A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY

• Starring Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan and Dan Hedaya
• Directed by John Fortenberry
• Rated PG-13, with profanity, partial nudity and adult content; running time 85 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a 4

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(Oct. 2, 1998) -- A Night at the Roxbury plops squarely into the rapidly growing pile of movies that includes such gems as Billy Madison, Black Sheep and The Coneheads.

The lone success of '90s' films based on Saturday Night Live sketches remains Wayne's World. Roxbury, however, has too little to work with at its core. Instead of the always funny Wayne and Garth, we're stuck with the distinctly less funny Butabi brothers, Steve (Will Ferrell) and Doug (Chris Kattan).

Stuck in some bubble of faux '80s hipness, the Butabis spend their nights trying to get into clubs to chase girls. The operative word is trying: Most clubs simply keep them standing in line, where they endlessly repeat a story about an encounter with Emilio Estevez erroneously calculated to impress.

Any club that will let them in inevitably is full of women hostile to their crude come-ons and dangerously frenetic dance style. These guys are so hard up, they welcome a traffic ticket from a female cop because it offers the actual opportunity to talk to a woman.

If they could only have a club of their own, they fantasize, they would do away with exclusivity and not hurt people's feelings. That is all a pipe dream, however, because they both work (in an extremely half-hearted way) in their father's Beverly Hills silk-flower showroom. Dad (Dan Hedaya) doesn't understand their skirt-chasing; he wants to marry off Steve to Emily Sanderson (Molly Shannon), daughter of the guy with the store next door.

There is some mild plotting involving a fender-bender with Richard Grieco (as himself), who gets them into the Roxbury, the most exclusive club in L.A. He also introduces them to the Roxbury's owner, Mr. Zadir (an uncredited Chazz Palminteri) who seems ready to bankroll Doug's concept for a nightclub.

But brotherly friction causes a split between the Butabis, with Doug moving out to the guest house by the pool. Their father zooms in and fast-tracks the marriage between Steve and Emily, who quickly takes over Steve's life.

Based on a recurring SNL skit that usually involved very little dialogue, Roxbury fleshes the Butabis out. Their lives, it seems, are set to a perpetual disco rhythm machine. But the script forgets to give them jokes to go with all that head-shaking they do.

While Ferrell (the larger Steve) and Kattan (the snaky George to Steve's Lenny) have a certain gift for slapstick, they don't know how to build the laughs. Their joke pacing is stuck at sketch-level, never accumulating momentum because the gags are so scattershot. The verbal humor mostly springs from catch-phrases, such as Doug's tendency to answer an obvious question, "No," wait a beat, then say "Yes" and dissolve in giggles. Laugh? I thought I'd die.

There are the occasional moments of stupid humor that actually work -- such as when Doug yells at his father, "You can't take our dreams," to which Steve adds, "Yeah -- because we're sleeping when we have them." More often, however, the script by Ferrell, Kattan and Steve Koren offers ideas for jokes, without truly developing them.

If I were to damn this film with faint praise, I would say that A Night at the Roxbury isn't as bad as a Pauly Shore movie. But even that would probably be too kind.