I had never heard of Please Don’t Destroy before watching their movie The Treasure of Foggy Mountain. But their brand of humor seems to be common to a lot of movies that have becoming out. They mostly bust each others balls for a 90-minutes movie, telling dirty jokes but still remain good friends at the end.
Ben (Ben Marshall), John (John Higgins) and Martin (Martin Herlihy) all live together and work at Trout Plus, an outdoorsman sporting guide style of shop owned and operated by Ben’s father, Farley (Conan O’Brien). But they’re mostly the ne’er do well types that appear in a lot of movies like this. Judd Apatow is the producer if you need a frame of reference for all the penis jokes here. Martin learns through watching a TikTok video with his religious girlfriend, Amy (Nichole Sakura), that a compass they found as kids may be a sign to how they can find a much sought after bust of Marie Antoinette.
So, they set off to hike in the Foggy Mountain State Park. But mostly, spend much of their trek getting into one misadventure after another with some comedic elements but it stretches out the plotline even for a movie that is only about an hour and a half. Sophomoric humor can only go so far. We see them dropping the F-bomb in church at Martin’s baptism or hanging out with park rangers, Lisa (Melissa Stalter) and Taylor (X Mayo) but we’ve seen these same scenes in better movies. And Taylor even has the hots for John who initially doesn’t take the hint. But Lisa and Taylor have an ulterior motive upon learning they’re treasure hunting.
There’s a lot of ideas that never fully come to their potential and this seems like a few story ideas that got connected together for a movie. I think the filmmakers thought people would laugh at O’Brien dropping the F-bomb since he had to keep it cleaner on TV for decades. But he has often dropped the F-bomb in interviews and documentaries so there’s not much of a surprise. I still think it’s clever casting since Ben has red hair and O’Brien has made his red hair and freckles a staple of his comedy most of his career.
There’s hints at the beginning about a missing person Deetch Nordwind (Bowen Yang) and you know it’s going to come up later in the movie. There’s a nice idea here about what happened to him but it fulfills the notion that all movies have to have an antagonist. I couldn’t help but notice similarities between the three friends and the ones from the comedy Good Boys. But that movie worked because the characters were too ignorant to know how vulgar or perverted the situations they found themselves in, which is how it surprisingly worked.
Being this is their first movie, it seems they have followed the Syd Fields’ style of screenwriting and while it’s short for a movie produced by Apatow, I feel they should have done their own story. I’d hate to draw the comparisons with Without a Paddle, the irreverent comedy that made Dax Shepherd a household name, but it’s easy to see. And like that movie, I laughed at scenes and had a great time. But I really had no desire to watch it again anytime soon.
It’s no surprise this movie received mixed reviews from critics and better reviews from fans or the audience. This is the type of silly comedy you don’t have to think a lot about. But I would like to think Please Don’t Destroy would do something better for their second movie.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 