There was a time when a movie starring Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones would’ve been Oscar bait and/or box office gold, but it perhaps speaks on the reality of the times we live in that The Comeback Trail (now streaming on Paramount+) is a trifling comedy that sat on the shelf unreleased for five years. So it goes? The film’s genesis is sort of an interesting story – director George Gallo (who belongs in the hall of fame for writing Midnight Run) remade Harry Hurwitz’s 1982 comedy The Comeback Trail, starring Buster Crabbe of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials fame as an over-the-hill Western star hired by shady movie producers scheming for him to die on set for an insurance payout. That movie was filmed eight years before it was released, and nobody remembers it; the remake was in distribution hell for five years, and despite stirring up a few decent laughs, seems destined to a similar fate.
The Gist: HOLLYWOOD, 1974: Clergyfolk shout slogans and carry signs outside a movie theater, protesting the mere existence of the film Killer Nuns. That doesn’t bode well for the movie’s producer duo Max Barber (De Niro) and his nephew Walter Creason (Zach Braff). They can’t sell any tickets and Max is three-and-a-half big bills in debt to the film’s unamused financier, Reggie Fontaine (Freeman), who happens to be a gangster who’s killed people for less. If Max wasn’t such a slippery-shady wheeler-dealer, he’d probably be dead by now. He buys some time with a little this-and-that and verbal sleight-of-hand – an oxymoronical thing that exists only for guys like Max – and goes home to his house that rattles every few minutes or so when a plane leaves or arrives at the adjacent airport, something that rarely seems to shake him out of his shady state of mind.
Now, Max could pay his debts if he sold his beloved script, titled Paradise, to James Moore (Emile Hirsch), a former associate who’s since moved far beyond Max’s rinky-dink Miracle Motion Pictures production company. How far? Well, he lives nowhere near the airport, and can offer Max a million bucks for the script, and get A-lister Frank Pierce (Patrick Muldoon) to star in the film. But Max, despite churning out sketchy grindhouse dreck for years, stubbornly refuses to sell out in this instance, proclaiming Paradise to be his dream, his sure-fire Oscar winner – although Max is a bit, shall we say, late in his career, and achieving that dream may not be realistic. Just don’t tell him that; he surely wouldn’t take it well. And besides, he hates Frank Pierce. How much? Well, he whoops with joy when Frank, an ego-dolt who brags about doing his own stunts, does his very last own stunt and tumbles off a building and splatters on top of a city bus. Walter, being a decent human being, is horrified by all of this, but he’s not decent enough to walk away from his uncle, shave off his standard-issue shady-movie-producer mustache, and make an honest living.
Walter might do that if he knew what Max was up to next. See, James scored $5 million in an insurance payout after Frank died, which inspires Max to dust off an old Western script, throw together a janky cast and crew and roll film. What he doesn’t tell Walter is that he intends to cast a schmuck in the lead and engineer an “accidental” death all the way to the bank. Max and Walter drop in at a “retired actors home” and stumble across Duke Montana (Jones), a drunken old codger so far away from his screen-cowboy fame, every day he puts a bullet in his revolver, spins it, and sticks the barrel in his mouth. YIKES. He’s PERFECT. Max whatevers his way through the production – insert wacky episodes with a goofball animal wrangler (Chris Mullinax) and blonde not-as-much-of-a-bimbo-as-she-looks director (Kate Katzman) here – until Duke goes in front of the camera, where he’s absolutely certain to fall off a rigged rope bridge or be burned to death leaping his horse through flames, right? If only!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Comeback Trail rides the aging-star-teamup energy of movies like Stand Up Guys and Space Cowboys (or, to cross the gender divide, 80 for Brady and Book Club) and crosses it with stuff from movie-biz satires like Living in Oblivion or Tropic Thunder.
Performance Worth Watching: De Niro goes so ludicrously over-the-top BIG in this, it takes an hour for his blood pressure to wind down. That leaves Jones to be the heart of the story, thanks to a performance that steps outside the broadstroked screenplay and gives it a little soul.
Memorable Dialogue: Max feels rather strongly about James buying his beloved Paradise: “I’ll will that script to Ed Wood before I let you get your greasy f—ing hands on it!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Gallo proved to be a master of the one-liner with Midnight Run, and he maintains some of his mojo for the old-school old-guy dark-comic silliness that is The Comeback Trail. Still, it’s hit-and-miss at best, with some of the zinger-laden dialogue benefitting from De Niro’s off-the-leash gonzo performance. Otherwise, the actor’s work could be interpreted as an overcompensation for the film’s limp slapstick comedy, inside-baseball movie-biz references and ankle-deep emotional overtures. And frankly, it doesn’t live up to the promise of its casting, as its trio of headlining veteran stars share very few scenes, the three of them coming together for one scene deep in the film; although it’s a relief that they aren’t asked to deliver any wheezy old-fart jokes about aching backs and incontinence, one can’t help but wonder why anyone would cast De Niro, Freeman and Jones if they’re not going to play off each other, and let iron sharpen iron.
Gallo instead stages his three principles as points on the moral spectrum: Freeman as a cold-blooded mobster whose affinity for classic Hollywood may be his weakness, Jones as the noble soul in a depressive rut and De Niro as an unstable sort wavering between visionary artist with a dream and unapologetic shysterdom. There are times when we wonder if De Niro’s Max is truly capable of staging another man’s death for material gain, but there’s little room for nuance in this screenplay, which struggles to balance the bleak chortles of a narcissistic movie star plummeting to his death with Looney Tunes-inspired scenes of De Niro getting walloped by a horse. Finding a happy tonal medium with such material is a near-impossible task.
And so The Comeback Trail clods along, unsure of what it wants to accomplish. It lacks the detail to be a treatise on aging (Clint Eastwood has made handfuls of better movies on the topic) or a satire of the post-mid-century exploitation-movie biz (see: the charming and spirited Eddie Murphy vehicle Dolemite is My Name). It exists in the why-bother mush zone where it diddles and fiddles with a few ideas and doesn’t settle on any of them. Drop some of the excess baggage, and it’s sort of almost but not really the story of a guy who reaches the stale and lonely end of the most desperate scheme in a life defined by desperate scheming, and sort of almost but not really finds his heart – and that doesn’t take into account the redemption arc of the Jones character, which feels like an afterthought. Considering the hooray-for-Hollywood ending, Gallo would like the movie to be a soft and squishy feelgood fable, but instead of fully committing to the bit, he just leans as far away as he can from the darker elements of the story without falling on his ass – and the result is a frustratingly unfocused movie that doesn’t make us laugh enough to overlook its flaws.
Our Call: The Comeback Trail might appeal to the TCM crowd if it had a tighter screenplay and better balanced its messy blend of sophisticated themes and lowbrow humor. But it’s little more than a bunch of aging fellas farting around without much direction. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.