A male stripper tries to make amends with his half-brother.
Directed by: Michael Hanus
Starring: Michael Hanus, Guy Christie, Jamie Kennedy, Rob Wells, Nicole Sullivan, Silvana Azurdia, Jason Burkart, Pamela Anderson
Jackhammer starts out with Julius, a struggling actor screwing up a big audition with huge casting director Lance Selmour, who then makes it his mission to ruin Julius’s career forever. Without a job or idea of what to do anymore, Julius turns to his crazy, over-the-top stripper half-brother, Jackhammer, for help. Jackhammer then introduces Julius to the world of stripping, where Jackhammer enlists the help of Frederick to get Julius ready to start stripping with them. After making some good money stripping, the brothers have a falling out, and after Julius goes off on his own, Jackhammer realizes that he has to make things right between him and his brother.
This is the point in the film where the focus really shifts from Julius’s story to Jackhammer’s, and that is really unfortunate, because Jackhammer is such an over-the-top, boring character that the film really dips in quality. It then becomes a bumbling idiot’s redemption story, instead of a potentially interesting story about a guy trying to find his place in the world.
Pulling triple duty on the film - co-writing, directing and starring - Hanus did well on the look of the film because as an independent film, it looks pretty good. Even the editing, camera work, effects, make up, and costumes all look good in this. Sadly, besides that and the occasional chuckle, the film is a dud. The story and characters are just plain stupid. Christie as Julius, who is just okay here, is the only one who comes close to having a relatable or even partially likeable character, and he is, for some reason that I can’t think of, gone for a portion of the film that drags the hardest. No one is impressive in this, and I can’t think of a single character that I would want to meet or be friends with in the real world, because everyone is so annoyingly dumb. Characters spend all their screen time yelling stereotypical phrases in attempts at comedy that far more often than not, fall flat.
The best way to explain it would be to compare the comedy style to that of the horrible parody movies that have come out over the last decade or so. It’s better than the awful parodies I’m referring to, but not by much, because they follow the same generic style of having wildly over-stereotypical characters setting up, and poorly executing, highly predictable jokes.
3/10