AIRHEADS

AIRHEADS (Directed by Michael Lehmann. Starring Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, Adam Sandler, Joe Mantegna)

Brendan Fraser, who starred as a neanderthal in California Man, moves even further down the evolutionary scale in his follow up. He is the long haired, vacant faced Chazz (spelt with an all important double Z), leader of slacker rock group The Lone Rangers, a trio too dim to realise you can’t pluralise lone. With the weasely, over-eager Steve Buscemi (Mr Pink from Reservoir Dogs) and the perpetually dazed Adam Sandler (so dim, even by their dim standards, he has to be the drummer), they make a (mostly inadvertently) entertaining group of wannabees, nursing a chip on their shoulder about the record industry and a blind faith in their own destiny. Convinced, as so many have been before them, that all they need is one lucky break, they force their way into an LA alternative radio station to get their demo played, and, more by accident than design, wind up at the centre of a hostage drama.

Airheads is almost a great rock and roll comedy that gets bogged down in over-obvious media satire, mishandled slapstick and slackly edited farce. Michael Lehmann directed the hip and vicious teen comedy Heathers, but this is more like the sprawling mess he made of Hudson Hawk. There is a badly structured sub-plot in which a haemorrhoids afflicted accountant attempts a Die Hard style mission in the station’s heating duct, and a series of unfunny encounters between a cop and the denizens of the LA rock scene, which rely for all their supposed humour on the cop’s obesity. And, casting directors please note, it would take a lot more than a curly wig to turn the gangster like presence of Joe Mantegna into a disc jockey.

Yet, despite poor pacing, dumb plotting and miscasting, Airheads evinces as sure a feel for pop music’s built in self-importance and inherent idiocies as The Commitments or Spinal Tap. These are people who believe playing loud music in and of itself constitutes an important statement, and when pressed on air by the DJ to elaborate on exactly what that statement is, all they can come up with is “Rock and roll!” By the time The Ramones appear on the soundtrack, you realise that this occasionally hilarious portrait of blind musical ambition may be too close to the truth to even call satire.