​We don’t do a lot of comedies at the Mediocre Movie Club because they can be hard to talk about.  A film whose goal is laughter can be distilled into how many laughs it got, and what one person finds funny can be wildly different, to the point that laughing at a risqué or taboo joke, no matter how well constructed, might alienate someone offended by it forever.  It’s easier to explain why a film makes me tear up than laugh.  Laughter feels more unknowable.  That’s all to say that on the whole, Monty Python and the Holy Grail doesn’t make me laugh.  The guys who make up this British comedy troupe have surely inspired the things that I do find foundationally funny, like The Simpsons or Conan O’Brien, but what might have been innovative in the 70’s has since been perfected by better writers and become hacky, a fate all comedy is destined for and one which Monty Python has long since arrived at.

With films like The Polar Express and Welcome to Marwen, Robert Zemeckis has spent most of the last twenty years trying to work out the kinks in CGI filmmaking.  This quixotic pursuit is made all the more useless thanks to Zemeckis’ mastery of the old-fashioned animation style in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  Who needs ones and zeroes when you’ve got a game Bob Hoskins?  Blending real actors and sets with animated characters, and vice versa, Who Framed Roger Rabbit still impresses by being committed, even when the effects aren’t quite seamless.  Zemeckis has made a fool of himself for much of the 21st century, but in the 80’s and 90’s, the crowd-pleaser king sat on a throne of Deloreans and Acme hammers.

​Spoofs take off on movie trends, while satire pokes fun at the real world.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone hilariously combine the two with Team America: World Police, a film that uses the bombastic bravado of Michael Bay action films to skewer multiple varieties of American arrogance in the post-9/11 era.  There was a period in my life when this was about as funny as a comedy could possibly be.  Self-serious puppets on a film production that isn’t interested in maintaining any kind of cinematic illusion made every scene a riot, but now, when Parker’s and Stone’s status as the ultimate Gen X nihilists has gotten tiresome and a certain kind of shitposter has poisoned their brand, Team America has lost some of its luster.  It’s still hilarious as a spoof, but its satire equates being a blowhard with invading and destroying countries.  Parker and Stone would discount that as saying this is a puppet movie, the hiding spot of every 4chan asshole making Pepe memes about crematoria.

​As movie studios become increasingly reliant on franchises and legacy properties, they’ve come to the semi-pathetic conclusion that if one franchise is working, why not smoosh several together?  Warner Brothers has done this to commercial success with Ready Player One and Space Jam 2, though the former is Steven Spielberg’s worst movie by a wide margin and I’m never going to watch the latter.  Monopolist behemoth Disney has dipped a toe in these waters with a subplot in Ralph Breaks the Internet, and dives all the way in with Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers, a film that imagines all the Disney animated characters existing alongside live-action actors and going through the same struggles of auditions and fan convention merch tables.  The best any of these mish-mashes can hope for is having talented people muddle their way through and salvage whatever laughs they can find, and that’s generally the case here.  Roping in two thirds of the Lonely Island goes a long way towards tolerability for what is otherwise a stockholder presentation of a company’s vast asset portfolio.