'Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping' Review: A Longer 'SNL' Digital Short Isn't Funnier
Andy Samberg as Conner 4 Real in ‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’ (Photo: Universal Pictures via AP)
By Owen Gleiberman, Variety
If Andy Samberg were still on Saturday Night Live, you wouldn’t have to close your eyes too hard to imagine Conner 4 Real, the cluelessly self-confident idiot white-boy rapper he plays in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, as the featured playa on one of Samberg’s SNL Digital Shorts. Conner has tattoos running down his arms, and he sports a diamond earring, gold chains, and a hip-hop haircut so unthreatening it looks like it should be called the Ivy League Fade. A middle-class poseur who knows that he’s a sellout but pretends he’s a gangsta, Conner is straight outta Sacramento, and his success is a pure product of marketing. Yet all his trademarks—the baggy clothes and obscene lyrics, the palms-down “inner city” hand gestures—are signifiers of his authenticity.
If Samberg had sprung this character on us back in the day (as Conner himself might put it), he would probably have created an instant video classic to place alongside “Lazy Sunday” and “D— in a Box.” At the very least, he could have ruled YouTube for a week or so. But let’s pretend that he made that Digital Short, and that it went viral, and that it became enough of a conversation piece to be spun off into its own big-screen mockumentary, and that the film—like almost every other SNL spin-off comedy—turned out to be a terrific sketch inflated into a movie that overstays its welcome. Popstar is that movie. It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.
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The best thing about the movie is that Conner 4 Real, in 2016, comes off as not really all that farfetched a star. He grew up performing with his two buddies, Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akiva Schaffer), and they became a teenage pop-rap trio called Style Boyz—a kind of high-gloss version of the Beastie Boys, or maybe NSYNC with less harmony and more (nasty) rhymes. Part of the film’s observational slyness is its perception that hip-hop, at a certain point, became an entirely co-opted form: a pantomime of toughness for soft, safe suburban kids. Style Boyz, at least, are honest appropriators, but Popstar is about what happens after Conner breaks off from them to pursue a solo career as a prefab icon of sexed-up danger.
Watch a clip featuring Maya Rudolph from ‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’:
As Conner 4 Real, he’s a crossover king who’s like Vanilla Ice with more convoluted fake street cred, but damned if the entire world doesn’t love him. Popstar is overflowing with rappers and other entertainers, all playing themselves, who appear in interview snippets to testify to Conner’s awesome badassery. They include Nas, 50 Cent, Usher, Questlove, Mariah Carey, Pharrell Williams, Ringo Starr, even the eternally hard-to-please Simon Cowell (“He really is the real deal!”). The movie is a gushing bounty of celebrity, and while the ostensible point of all these cameos is to create a texture of verisimilitude, most of the comments they make are kind of lame, so the parade comes off as something else—an advertisement of Andy Samberg’s superstar friends. Look at all the great people I got to be in my movie! There are even more of them in character roles: the usual gang of SNL alums (Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Tim Meadows—it’s mind-boggling to think that Will Ferrell isn’t in this movie), plus Justin Timberlake (as Conner’s personal chef), Sarah Silverman (as his publicist), Adam Levine (as an on-stage hologram), and Seal (as Seal, who serenades Conner and his fiancée and then gets torn apart by wolves). The movie isn’t just star-packed—it’s top-heavy. It doesn’t have enough room for the spontaneity a comedy like this one needs.
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In Popstar, Andy Samberg has cast himself as the Derek Zoolander of rap: a myopic narcissist doomed by his inability to think about anything but his own image. That’s a sweet peg for a sendup of the current pop-music marketplace, but Samberg, though he does blitzed self-obsession to a T, can’t hide his essentially friendly, eager-to-please nature. He’s playing a spoiled-brat pop star, but his performance doesn’t call up the naked ego of someone who’s drunk on fame. Christopher Guest, in This Is Spinal Tap (the clear inspiration for Popstar), made Nigel Tufnel a svelte prince of bombast who thought he walked on water. And Ben Stiller, in Zoolander (even in the recent, inferior sequel), turned media-age vanity into a rowdy burlesque of grossly unentitled entitlement. But Andy Samberg’s performance isn’t rich or funny or—perhaps—daring enough to make Conner into a resonant douchebag. Samberg wants to play at parody, but he also wants to throw a wack communal media party. He may be too happy a camper to scald.
If Popstar had been an SNL Digital Short, the whole thing would have been a musical number, and a couple of Conner’s rap performances are indeed golden. The video for a song called “Equal Rights” (“I’m not gay, but if I were, I would want equal rights!”) is visually hilarious, though the comic thrust—that Conner has to keep saying he’s “not gay”—becomes a little didactic. But there’s one song that’s spectacular: the one in which Conner compares how hard he wants to make love to someone to what the U.S. military did to Osama bin Laden. (I could say that in simpler language, but not on this website.) It’s almost triumphant in its mad myopia. You want to explode into giggles—and download the song.
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But Popstar, taking its cue too literally from Spinal Tap, turns into a healing-hands buddy comedy about Conner falling from the limelight and getting over himself enough to reunite with his two friends from Style Boyz: Jorma Taccone’s Owen, the DJ who Conner forces to wear a Daft Punk sci-fi helmet on stage; and Akiva Schaffer’s Lawrence, who becomes a farmer in a Unabomber beard. Taccone and Schaffer, who co-directed Popstar, really are Samberg’s original band; they’re the boyhood friends he collaborated with on his SNL Digital Shorts. In a funny way, though, the plot of this movie mimics a little too closely what may have gone on behind the scenes. Taccone and Schaffer support their old pal and build a nice rollicking media funhouse for him to play around in. But they never quite tell him how to bring the funny.
‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’: Watch a trailer: