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Movie Review: 'Action Point'

'The Dollop' did it better but Johnny Knoxville's pain is still funny.

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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In 2015 the American history/comedy podcast The Dollop told the story of New Jersey’s Action Park. Action Park was an amusement park without rules, with few protections and loads of injuries and, much more seriously, several deaths. The park was filled with death trap amusements like a wave pool that could hold over one thousand people and averaged thirty rescues per day among their crew of lifeguards.

Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds hilariously detailed the excitement and terror of Action Park in this episode and its no surprise that this story would inspire a movie. Action Point is not a direct adaptation of the story of Action Park, but the inspiration is quite clear if rather sanitized and toothlessly satirized. Instead of the darkly funny true story told by The Dollop, we get Jackass at an amusement park.

Johnny Knoxville stars in Action Point as D.C, an irresponsible drunk who runs an amusement park in southern California. With new competition from an actual amusement park with standards and safety, D.C hatches a plan to make Action Point even more unsafe than it already is with new attractions like ziplines, a water slide with a loop-de-loop, and absolutely no safety guidelines.

Amid the chaos, D.C has a personal story going on with his estranged daughter Boogie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). Boogie has arrived to spend the summer with her dad with an ulterior motive of getting him to sign away his parental rights. She loves her father but she rarely sees him and wants to allow her mother’s new boyfriend to have parental rights. This story is meant to bring dramatic weight to Action Point but it is so clumsy and conventional that it only gets in the way of the only appeal the film has, Knoxville being badly injured.

I don’t have anything against Johnny Knoxville as a person or performer, I even consider the Jackass movies as a guilty pleasure. That said, I love watching Knoxville get hurt. Action Point never failed to make me laugh when Knoxville is battered in some way. Much the way the Jackass movies were funny when the guys found elaborate ways to harm themselves, Action Point is funny only when Knoxville is thrown through walls by a trebuchet or crashes a go-kart in a way that doesn’t look like a planned stunt.

When Action Point is trying to be a real movie with a plot involving an evil land baron, played by Dan Bakkedahl, trying to steal the park away from our Meatballs style crew of outsiders, it falters and sputters to a dull stop. The plot of Action Point is perfunctory and even Knoxville seems to treat it as something he must endure in order to get to the next idiotic yet hilarious stunt.

I can’t recommend Action Point as it barely amounts to an actual movie but I can’t deny how funny it is to watch Knoxville get hurt. Knoxville’s rag doll stunts never fail to get a laugh no matter how forced the stunt is amid the conventional plot. The main issue I have, however, is the fact that there is a pretty great real story about Action Park that gets glossed over in favor of Knoxville’s stunt show.

The Dollop raised numerous darkly comic laughs from the real story of Action Park. Dave Anthony’s droll storytelling and Gareth Reynolds’ unending apoplexy deliver an almost cinematic story with just words. A great filmmaker could make something rather incredible out of the story of Action Park and a great filmmaker is desperately missing from Action Point, which uses this terrific story as just an excuse for a Jackass period piece.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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