Hock the Line

The biggest laughs come from players who know how to hit their sketch-comedy marks quickly and move on: from Tim Meadows as Dewey's drummer, whose antidrug warnings inevitably turn into a can't-resist come-hither, to Harold Ramis as Mad magazine's idea of a Jewish record mogul, more likely to cut foreskins than 45s. The rest of the movie blows through opportunities like Mötley Crüe through coke money. It takes almost a perverse determination to put Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman, and Justin Long in a room together as the Beatles, and then give them so little to do that even Eddie Vedder's cameo as an awards-show presenter smokes them. (The DVD extras will almost certainly be better.) Walk Hard limps soft — but if John C. Reilly turns up anywhere onstage in your town, go. If there's anything America needs now, it's more Cox.