The big problem with “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show” is that it doesn’t have enough Vince Vaughn. The mouthy actor can be a raucously funny presence, but he declines center stage in this hot-and-cold movie.
And what is this movie? Well, it’s partly a concert film, but mostly a behind-the-scenes documentary about a tour Vaughn organized in autumn 2005. He got together four stand-up comedians (none of them famous) and a few guest stars, and took to the road for 30 nights of touring.
Beginning in Hollywood and ending in Chicago, the tour mostly hit smaller cities in the Midwest and South. When hurricanes interrupted the flow, that became part of the movie, too.
Vaughn selected the comics. They are: Ahmed Ahmed, who mines material out of being an Arab-American; John Caparulo, who seems to represent NASCAR America; Bret Ernst, an Everyman type, and Sebastian Maniscalco, whose riffs on romance, cleanliness and the terrors of shopping at Ross suggest he might be the most talented of the bunch.
When the tour starts, Maniscalco has been working as a waiter to support his comedy efforts. Part of the film’s appeal is that these lunch-bucket comics are trying to claw their way up the ladder.
We glimpse some of the insecurities that go into stand-up, although Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian” remains definitive on that point. These guys have some funny moments in bits (and that’s how we see them — the clips from their routines aren’t long enough to build any flow), but nobody threatens to be the next Seinfeld.
What makes this movie watchable is the backstage material, and Vaughn himself. These days Vaughn looks as though he is perpetually waking up from a 48-hour bender, but his ability to talk his way into something funny is intact.
He does a hilarious onstage routine with his friend Peter Billingsley, a former child actor (now producer) best known as the kid in “A Christmas Story.” They do a dramatic reading from an “Afternoon Special” they performed in as teenagers.
Vaughn’s “Swingers” co-star Jon Favreau and the ubiquitous Justin Long are around, and music is provided by Dwight Yoakum and Buck Owens. Is it enough to save this ramshackle enterprise? Not really. Here’s hoping the DVD has lots of Vaughn outtakes.
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