Butler's Cinema Scene

Melissa Rauch

“THE BRONZE”  My rating: C-

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

I spent much of “The Bronze” wondering what drugs (or combination of drugs and alcohol) might make it as funny as it thinks it is.

This staggeringly raunchy (yet overwhelmingly morose) comedy from Melissa Rauch (a regular on TV’s “The Big Bang Theory,” she stars and wrote the screenplay with her husband,  Winston Rauch) centers on Hope, a small town shrew who for more than a decade has been milking her limited fame as a bronze-medal-winning Olympic gymnast.

Hope retains the blonde bangs and ponytail that were her trademark as an adolescent athlete. She never goes out unless she’s wearing a red, white and blue star-spangled warmup suit to remind local residents that a giant walks among them.

She has her own designated parking space on Main Street. She gets free food at the local restaurant. For goods that cost money there’s the cash she steals from letters in the mailbag of her dad (Gary Cole), an employee of the  U.S. Postal Service.

Hope is profane,  hateful, conceited, mean-spirited, drunk, doped-up and entitled.

All that would be okay if she were also hysterically funny, but most of the laughs in this film either miss the mark or have such sharp edges that it’s like swallowing ground glass.

Melissa Rauch, Haley Lu Richardson

“The Bronze’s” plot kicks in when Hope’s old coach dies, leaving the former star athlete $500,000 if Hope will guide their town’s hot young gymnast, Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), to the world finals in Toronto. With visions of cold hard cash dancing in her head, Hope agrees to take on the project — though she almost immediately tries to sabotage the effort by having Maggie eat nothing but fast food and introducing her to a horny teenage boy.

Maggie is so innocent and, well, stupid that she continues to look up to her foul-mouthed mentor.

Like the similarly-themed “Bad Santa,” “The Bronze” is about a despicable individual forced to confront her long-buried decency. Unfortunately, “The Bronze” is so alienating in its early stages (our first glimpse of Hope is of her using her bronze medal as a sex toy) that the movie never recovers.

Director Bryan Buckley,  making his feature debut after numerous shorts, always seems to be just out of step with the material.

The film does have the year’s most bizarre scene in which Hope and another former gymnast (Sebastian Stan) engage in hotel room bonking that gives new meaning to the phrase “athletic sex.”  It’s like a live-action version of the puppet porn in “Team America: World Police.”

| Robert W. Butler