Here Comes For Boom movie video trailer

A family movie that could lead to clan feuding, Here Comes the Boom is the story of a genial, overweight high school biology teacher. He’s a couch potato who has begun to actually resemble a sofa, but when his impoverished school is about to lose its music program, Scott Voss (Kevin James) sucks in his stomach and puts up his dukes, successfully moonlighting as a UFC prize fighter.

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Here Comes the Boom movie overview

As a comic actor, Kevin James has at least one saving grace: Even in the stupidest movies, he’s surprisingly uningratiating, as if he acknowledges that he’s a human being first and an actor in need of a paycheck second.

That’s true even in a dismal piece of work like “Here Comes the Boom,” directed by Frank Coraci (“The Wedding Singer,” “The Waterboy”), a picture that’s otherwise pretty much devoid of anything but the most plastic charms. James plays Scott Voss, a high school biology teacher who once cared about his students but has since devolved into the kind of educator who gives the kids dumb busy work and then hides behind the sports page. We’re given no reason for Scott’s lack of enthusiasm, even though the movie’s opening shot shows us a “teacher of the year” plaque, circa 2002, hanging on his bedroom wall. Clearly, something has gone amiss, but the details supposedly don’t matter. Instead, we’re simply made to understand that Scott Voss is the male version of Carmen Diaz’s “Bad Teacher,” only a lot less good-looking.

Something has to jolt Scott out of his classroom ennui, and when he learns that the school’s beloved music teacher (played by Henry Winkler, wrapped in a series of cozy sweaters) is about to be dismissed thanks to lack of funding, the gears in Scott’s brain start turning – slowly, but hey, it’s a start. He decides to help the school raise the necessary funds to keep the music program going, choosing the easiest route imaginable for an out-of-shape teacher in his early 40s: He turns his hand to mixed martial arts, enlisting a Dutch immigrant named Niko (real-life martial-arts guy Bas Rutten) to help him train. Meanwhile, he also makes moo-moo eyes at the school nurse, and what a nurse! She’s played by Salma Hayek, whose bodacious, easy-going appeal is mostly wasted.

It doesn’t matter that you pretty much know what’s going to happen in “Here Comes the Boom” after watching the first ten minutes. In the right hands, a predictable movie can still be completely pleasurable. But “Here Comes the Boom” is simply inept. Plot developments are alluded to but never actually shown. (Scott gets his brother, an unhappy house painter, a job as a chef, but we never see it happen – the guy simply appears in a restaurant dressed in a chef’s outfit, all of his problems solved in the blink of an eye.) Scott gets his first big moment of fame when he vomits copious amounts of bad applesauce on an opponent and the clip shows up on YouTube. And the movie’s rousing finale comes complete with a chorus of schoolchildren singing Neil Diamond’s quasi-spiritual anthem “Holly Holy,” as Scott attempts to save the day (and the music program) by throwing himself into the ring with a mighty bruiser. Predictability is OK; laziness is something else.

It’s true that “Here Comes the Boom” – which was written by James and Allan Loeb — could be much worse: It might have featured Adam Sandler or Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill; it might have been distressingly ironic and post-modern instead of simply old-fashioned in the cookie-cutter sense. And James at least comes off as an unassuming if bland presence – it’s really not that much fun to watch him getting tossed around the ring like a rag doll, or to see his face being smashed against a chain-link enclosure in a cage fight. Maybe that’s supposed to make his ultimate victory seem sweeter. Instead, the end of “Here Comes the Boom” is simply a relief. It’s nice that the hero goes to the mat for what he believes in. But he’s not the only thing that comes down with a thud.

Here Comes the Boom movie cast and crew

Directed by
Frank Coraci



Kevin James

Salma Hayek

Henry Winkler

Greg Germann

Joe Rogan

Gary Valentine

Charice

Bas Rutten

Reggie Lee

Mark DellaGrotte

Mookie Barker

Jackie Flynn

Nikki Tyler-Flynn

Melissa Peterman

Here Comes the Boom movie review

A family movie that could lead to clan feuding, Here Comes the Boom is the story of a genial, overweight high school biology teacher. He’s a couch potato who has begun to actually resemble a sofa, but when his impoverished school is about to lose its music program, Scott Voss (Kevin James) sucks in his stomach and puts up his dukes, successfully moonlighting as a UFC prize fighter.

 A farther-fetched fantasy: In addition to asking we believe our loosely packed academic can play Rocky, Here Comes the Boom imagines a world in which butterball Everyman Scott and the fabulously lush Bella (Salma Hayek) might argue and bill and coo and eventually fall in love.

James, formerly TV’s King of Queens, plays the film’s unlikely hero with a light touch and comic ingenuity. He’s good at rubbery pratfalls and wounded double-takes. Hayek, meanwhile, tackles the role of the high school’s bawdy, wisecracking nurse like she’s been studying old Joan Blondell movies, dispensing sour putdowns with surgical precision and clowning up a storm in a memorable full-contact date with her overly attentive admirer.

At its best, when James is mixing it up with Hayak and old pro Henry Winkler (the school’s milquetoast music teacher), Here Comes the Boom achieves the breezy, off-hand charm of a broadly played TV sitcom. And younger viewers will get a kick out of Scott’s showcase ring failures, which include a flying cannonball through a disintegrating ring. In another sequence, our crusading biology teacher twice spews a violent torrent of applesauce onto an opponent after taking a couple of piston jabs to his pillow-like stomach.

Speaking of digestive problems, many adults, even smart, cynical teenagers with a low tolerance for Hollywood civics lessons, might find themselves gagging on Here Comes the Boom’s “serious” side, especially in the film’s latter third, when filmmaker Frank Coraci (Zookeeper) gets all sanctimonious about America’s imperilled public education system.

That’s when the film turns into something perilously close to the “Yo Teach” segment from Funny People, itself a parody of big-hearted, deplorably unfunny classroom TV sitcoms such as Saved by the Bell. “Can anyone tell me what happens when a cell stagnates?” Scott asks his suddenly up-for-learning class, making a larger point about life and thwarted ambition.

Elsewhere, we have this corny-as-Kansas exchange between Scott and Bella before he steps into the ring, facing a dangerous, clearly superior opponent in a $50,000 prize fight that might save their school’s cherished music program:

Her (pleading): “What are you teaching them if you go through with this?”

Him (chin up, eyes narrowing): “What am I teaching them if I don’t?”

Ugh, pass the applesauce – but not too far. Here Comes the Boom will probably connect like a haymaker with most of its intended audience. The leads are likeable, and the plot, though beyond incredible, is at the very least distracting.

And if the movie only works for three-quarters of a family, well at least the unmoved parent and dissenting teenager get to enjoy a night out with popcorn, not to mention the sight of a younger member of the tribe whooping it up over this film year’s most spectacular and longest lasting vomit sight gag.