Movie Review - 'The Hammer'

The Hammer

Starring Adam Carolla, Heather Juergensen, and Oswaldo Castillo
Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
Rated R

You wouldn’t necessarily expect a movie that uses as its inspiration the rise to fame of one Adam Carolla to be that entertaining, but The Hammer somehow rises above its Private Parts-lite beginnings and its star’s lack of experience to win you over early and often.

Carolla was not always a wisecracking cable TV slacker and radio host; he used to be a wisecracking carpenter and a wisecracking boxing instructor. The Hammer begins here, with Jerry Ferro (Carolla) getting fired from his job as a carpenter and then given a miracle shot at Olympic trials as a 40-year-old light heavyweight amateur.

There are more slices of real life: Carolla casts his frequent radio sidekick, Nicaraguan construction worker Oswaldo Castillo, as Nicaraguan construction worker Oswaldo Sanchez, and the boxing gym featured in the film is the same one where Carolla and Castillo met nearly 20 years ago on a job.

If there’s a bone of contention with The Hammer, it’s that a lot of situations feel painstakingly set up for jokes. The same could be said about Woody Allen comedies, of course, but when Carolla wants to rant about the absurdity of the La Brea tar pits as a tourist attraction, naturally, a cozy five or six minutes of the movie has to be devoted to placing characters on the scene to let him riff about it.

It isn’t that the material isn’t funny – often it is – but after four or five scenes just like it, you begin to wish there was more thought put into The Hammer than “Hey, why don’t we just let Adam tell some jokes while we’re out here?”

Having said that, The Hammer is a bare bones comedy with more laughs than you would’ve bargained for, and it has a little more life, too.