Too much stale comedy keeps 'Rocket Man' from soaring

The Cincinnati Enquirer

Blame Jim Carrey. Or maybe Jerry Lewis. But comedies about compulsive class clowns appear to be with us for all time.

Take Rocket Man, the domain of a squealing freak called Fred (Harland Williams), a computer scientist who joins a mission to Mars.

Fred isn't stupid; in fact, the movie presents him as something of a whiz kid. It's just that his frequency is tuned to ''kooky-bizarre'' pretty much all the time.

Sometimes that's amusing -- as when he must occupy himself because he ends up awake while his fellow astronauts sleep through an eight-month space flight.

But most of his hijinks rely on the most tedious of all class-clown tactics, imitating old movies and television shows. Funny voices aren't cute for long unless the performer has something witty to say -- and Fred doesn't.

When the many-voices joke wears thin, the script by Craig Mazin and Greg Erb reverts to body-function humor: Fred eats laxative instead of space food; Fred dives headfirst into a space toilet; Fred passes gas inside his space suit.

Directed by Stuart Gillard, the film features realistic sets and special effects -- although it depicts NASA as a nest of incompetents.

The story cooks up a bit of danger for the Mars team near the end, chiefly a matter of people yelling ''Get out now!,'' ''He's still out there!,'' ''I'm going after him!,'' and so forth, with Fred clowning away through the whole thing.

The youngsters at whom this movie is aimed naturally have a pretty high tolerance for vacuous silliness. But what the makers of Rocket Man forgot is that eventually even kids begin to wish the class clown would sit down and shut up.

The Enquirer
Rocket Man
2 Stars

(PG; bathroom humor)
Harland Williams, Jessica Lundy, William Sadler, Beau Bridges.
Stuart Gillard.
101 minutes.
Playing at:
National Amusements, Cinema 10, Colony Square.