Not Even a Great Lineup of Comedians Could Save This Cringey Dark Comedy

Comedy may be the hardest kind of movie to make, and it may also be the hardest kind of movie to discuss. It is perhaps more dependent on the individual tastes of its audience than any other genre, and with so many different flavors of humor in existence, there is a fairly strong chance that what one person finds funny, another hundred will find groan-inducing, if it stirs in them any emotion at all. I confess that I have a tough time finding comedy I enjoy, with my tastes leaning more toward the screwball, slapstick, quick-witted likes of Leslie Nielsen and the Zucker brothers. It needn’t be sophisticated or clever, but it does need to be consistently surprising and elicit regular laughs. Laugh-a-minute is my brand of comedy.

This is most definitely not the style of Don’t Tell Larry, a new comedy that perhaps ever so slightly touches on the side of dark comedy. For the majority of its runtime, it plays like a straight, not-very-funny comedy of errors, before the final act takes a quick detour into drama and mild gallows humor. I suppose the fact that the whole story is triggered by someone dying could be considered black comedy, but for the most part, it is just an unremarkable, everyday comedy film that I will have forgotten about by this time next week.

What is ‘Don’t Tell Larry’ About?

It’s Monday morning, and Susan (Patty Guggenheim) has spent eight solid years as employee of the year at a travel firm run by Bruce Waters (the fabulous Ed Begley, Jr.), who is due to retire any day now. She is a shoo-in for the CEO position that he is about to vacate, and being that she’s such a gosh-darn great employee, she has organized a retirement party for Bruce. But the same day, an oddball named Larry (Kiel Kennedy) starts at the company and wastes no time in pissing people off with his weird foibles and lack of social graces. Desperate to avoid bringing the mood down, Susan passes on inviting Larry to that evening’s festivities.

Dana Carvey and Jennifer Esposito smiling in The Master of Disguise

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The next morning, Bruce informs Susan that Larry is, in fact, his estranged son, and to make up for a lifetime of absence, he plans on giving the CEO position to him, much to her outrage. When, later that day, Bruce falls to his death from his office window, Susan is sure that Larry murdered him, and ropes her colleague Patrick (Kenneth Mosley) into helping her prove it. This gives way to an avalanche of screw-ups that implicate Susan and Patrick deeper, raise the stakes, and paint Larry as even more of a madman than they first suspected.

‘Don’t Tell Larry’s Brand of Irreverent, Cringeworthy Humor Lets It Down

Admittedly, when you put it like that, it sounds like a pretty fun movie. It could have been. It’s not a bad setup for a wacky buddy comedy, and you could totally see something like this having been made in the ’80s. The thing is, in the ’80s, they probably would have written it to be a lot funnier than Don’t Tell Larry is. But the over-reliance on cringe humor in the 2020s that never knows when to call it a day, is what hurts this movie most.

It comes as no surprise that several members of this ensemble are also part of The Groundlings, the famous historic improv comedy troupe that produced a slew of North America’s most noted comedians over the last fifty-odd years. When you watch movies like Don’t Tell Larry, it is easy to assume that the standard of comedy at The Groundlings has gone downhill over the years, or perhaps it always tapped into that off-the-cuff, trying-your-patience sort of humor, but in the hands of better performers, it didn’t feel quite so grating. The legendary status of its older members and the wildly successful movies and shows they became known for could skew the perspective.

The action in Don’t Tell Larry never quite drops that frantic pacing and Ben Stiller brand of rom-com nervousness, in which the characters do stupid things, and keep piling on the stupidity, further escalating a shitstorm rather than just admitting defeat. It has that feeling of improvisation about it, and often with this territory comes a lack of fine-tuning. An improv-heavy movie needs a firm-handed director to say when enough is enough; otherwise, it can easily spin out into a self-indulgent piece that meanders away from its original point and lacks focus.

‘Don’t Tell Larry’ Is Better Suited for Television Than Film

Susan and Patrick, played by actors Patty Guggenheim and Kenneth Mosley, sit in an office caught off-guard in Don't Tell Larry. — Image via Level 33 Entertainment

While the movie is just about tightly directed enough not to feel quite so egregious, you have to wonder who sat in the writers’ room, wrote these scenes, and thought they were humorous. Perhaps they thought the comedy came from the delivery rather than the words or scenarios themselves. At times, this is the case, such as when Susan is hiding in a closet and comes close to being caught. Here, the framing and pacing of the shot is actually quite amusing. But for the most part, the material just doesn’t muster much of a reaction, and the movie seems to place most of its eggs in Larry’s basket, relying on the irreverent characterization of Kiel Kennedy that often borders on the psychotic. If you find inappropriate behavior in formal settings funny, then I guess this is the movie for you.

Don’t Tell Larry feels like it really should have been a half-hour episode of a television sitcom rather than a movie. There are parts of it that work fairly well and insert little jabs of absurdist humor into proceedings that prompt surprised laughter, but for the most part, it drags its feet for miles. The action may technically move along, but it tends to just feel like one stupid stunt after another. You can see the skeleton of the comedy showing through the emaciated body of the movie, as if the writers went with a starting point, a finishing point, and a few ideas for silly scenarios in between, and just told the actors to make up the rest.

It has its moments and is saved by good performances from side characters like Begley, Jr., and Dot-Marie Jones as the detective suspicious of Susan and Patrick’s shenanigans. But for the most part, Don’t Tell Larry is sluggish, unoriginal, and kind of annoying to watch. Thank God the trailer for the new Naked Gun movie looks promising. Perhaps, a few years from now, the screwball comedy will be back in full force, and we won’t have to rely so heavily on the cringey modern stylings of the genre to get our kicks. Fingers crossed.

Don’t Tell Larry comes to streaming and VOD services on June 20.