Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Director: Nick Giannopoulos
Director: Nick Giannopoulos
Stars: Nick Giannopoulos, Isla Fisher, Russell Dykstra, Felix
Williamson, Chantal Contouri, Costas Kilias, Ryan Johnson, Lena Cruz
Down Under Flix’s month-long focus on comedy continues this week
with a look at Nick Giannopoulos’s 2003 directorial debut The Wannabes. Danny
(Giannopoulos) is the ultimate theatre kid—singer, dancer, actor—bereft of both
humility and talent. He gets a job training a quartet of thugs to be children’s
entertainers, little knowing their act is a cover for a heist. While the crime
gets botched, the crew finds success as a Wiggles-esque group called The
Wannabes. Following February’s successful tag team review of Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, I’m joined below by Kathryn White, novelist
and blogger at Kathryn’s Inbox.
Ben: Australian comedy stars generally have short cinematic
tenures as marquee names, usually amounting to a few films apiece: see, for
example, Yahoo Serious (Young
Einstein, Reckless
Kelly, Mr
Accident), Mick Molloy (Crackerjack, Bad Eggs, last week’s BoyTown),
and director-star of this week’s film, Nick Giannopoulos (The Wog Boy, The Wannabes, Wog Boy 2: The Kings of Mykonos).
A big reason for this is the time that elapses between films. When a comedy
star hits big or shows promise to hit big in America, the Hollywood machine is
already in place to help sustain that momentum. After Ace Ventura: Pet Detective made
Jim Carrey a household name, The
Mask and Dumb
and Dumber followed in quick succession. Whatever you think of
Carrey and those films, that’s an incredible and decisive one-two-three punch.
In contrast, because much of their material is self-generated and because there
isn’t really that same infrastructure in place to support and manufacture new
content, when a new comedy star is birthed in an Australian film it can be a
few years before the next film surfaces to cash in on their popularity. By that
time, because there hasn’t been a steady succession of new gags and jokes to
stimulate their comedic personas, their popularity has waned and the original
smash hit has grown stale from over-exposure. Imagine if three years passed
between Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and
Carrey’s next film: there are only so many times you can watch this before it gets old and
you go looking elsewhere for giggles.
The
Wannabes came
out in 2003, four years after Giannopoulos’ first cinematic success with The Wog Boy. Giannopoulos had
enjoyed success on stage and the small screen (in the sitcom Acropolis Now) and The Wog Boy exported his
brand of ethnic Australian comedy to the big screen with lucrative results.
Released in 2000, the film was a commercial hit, earning close to $11.5 million
dollars at the local box office, making it the second most successful
Australian film released that year (behind The Dish and ahead of Looking for Alibrandi and Chopper) and landing it
in the 25 highest-earning Australian films of all time (current post: 24). In
contrast, The Wannabes grossed
just over $1.2 million dollars at the box office, around a tenth of The Wog Boy’s commercial haul,
which suggests that all the people that flocked to and dug The Wog Boy had tired of
it over repeat viewings in subsequent years (or perhaps grown weary of
Giannopoulos boasting about its success and shilling for commercials, both of
which he did an awful lot in The
Wog Boy’s aftermath).
This
was my first viewing of The
Wannabes, but you’ve seen it before and have an interesting history
with the film, don’t you?
Kathryn: The Wannabes was
a smash hit for me, literally. I was in the DVD section of a popular department
store, and for one reason or another, I picked up a copy of the DVD. At that
precise moment, the entire stand that contained copies of The Wannabes somehow
managed to fall apart, and copies of the DVD went everywhere. Every single
person in the store (or so it seemed) turned and looked at me, which is an
utterly excruciating experience for me—at that age, I was painfully shy and had
no idea what to do. Anyway, I was so embarrassed that I more or less felt bound
to buy a copy. Still, there must be some magic in a DVD copy of The Wannabes—while I was
sorting out the purchase of the DVD, I missed the bus that I had intended to
catch home. That particular bus crashed and some of the passengers ended up
with serious injuries. So, comparatively, I came out of it about $19 poorer and
the owner of a DVD that had suffered some pretty scathing reviews, but at least
I didn’t end up in a road accident.
My
family believe none of this by the way—they think it was some shithouse excuse
that I came up with to justify squandering my money on a lowbrow comedy that
stars Isla Fisher—who was one of my (many) teenage crushes, and someone who it
wasn’t exactly cool to like in 2003 (I thought she was awesome; I just had
trouble finding anyone who agreed with me).
When The Wannabes was released,
Isla Fisher was best known in Australia for playing
wild-child-turned-budding-author Shannon Reed on Home and Away, and had been
slapped with the usual stigma that goes with being an ex-soap star (Hollywood
was still on the horizon). Meanwhile, Nick Giannopoulos was a household name in
Australia that had become somewhat tired and over-exposed. From there, the rest
of the cast were actors that seemed to pop up in everything and anything made
in Australia (Chantal Contouri, Costas Kilias) or who were (at that point) not
big enough names to draw in an audience on their own merit (Ryan Johnson). The
former is a common complaint about Australian film and television. A country
with a (comparatively) small film and television industry will inevitably have
a small pool of actors to choose from, which can lead to those actors becoming
over-exposed and typecast. The Wannabes also
had another tough battle on its hands: 2003 was one of the worst performing years for Australian film at the box office. Even Ned Kelly, the top grossing
Australian film for 2003, made $8 million at the box office, while Japanese Story made half
of that. Getting’ Square,
which was the fifth highest grossing Australian film of 2003, barely made $2
million at the local box office. Meanwhile, there were a number of commercially
successful films being imported from overseas: Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix
Reloaded. This film never had a chance, in my opinion.
That
said, onto the movie itself. Now that you’ve finally viewed The Wannabes, what are your
thoughts Ben?
Ben: It’s fine. Average, but by no means the comedic abyss I’d
been led to expect. Lest it sound like I’m placing the blame for the film’s
mediocre box office entirely on apathetic audiences, it should be stressed that
it generally helps the cause when the film itself is strong. While local
audiences often do very fine Australian films a disservice by not turning up to
see them, they’re also pretty savvy about sniffing out damaged goods. Had The Wannabes been a minor
gem like The Wog Boy,
I’ve no doubt it would have punched through the wall of audience apathy and
found a wider audience through positive word of mouth, or at least built itself
a cult afterlife. As it stands, The
Wannabes is fairly underwhelming.
The
film marked a departure for Giannopoulos from his ethnic “Wog”-themed comedy;
as he notes in the DVD’s special features, after doing that comedy for fifteen
years he felt “It was time to put it to rest and move on”. To his credit,
Giannopoulos gives it his all onscreen and is unafraid to look like a doofus.
The rest of the ensemble similarly rise to the occasion: Fisher’s a nice,
laconic romantic interest; Russell Dykstra, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Costas Kilias,
and Ryan Johnson (from last week’s Thunderstruck) are mildly threatening and
enjoyably imbecilic as the low-rent criminals; Felix Williamson follows up his
fun turn as a clueless American gangster in Dirty Deeds as a similarly clueless American
entertainer; and Lena Cruz is a scenery-chewing whirling dervish as a
money-hungry bride.
Whilst
I didn’t find The Wannabes consistently
funny, it has its moments, and I would never say a comedy has to be a
laugh riot to be deemed a success. Sometimes, chemistry between actors or
pulling off a certain style or attitude will carry a film: I didn’t find Dad and Dave: On Our Selection or Beware of Greeks Bearing Guns particularly funny, but they were likable and personable
films. The Wannabes strives
for a similar likability, but I think less likable would have been the better
tone to pursue. There’s a certain base appeal to seeing children’s entertainers
in brightly-coloured suits swearing and beating each other up. Throw in a giant
marsupial costume, and it gets even better. The scenes where the film taps into
that base appeal are the most amusing, and it feels like the film could have
gone even darker comedically, milking that incongruity between goofy children’s
entertainment and small-time criminal activity for all the black comedy it’s
worth (think Danny DeVito’s Death
to Smoochy, released the previous year). As it stands, the film
feels tonally tentative, as though Giannopoulos, working outside his comfort
zone, wasn’t completely willing to commit to that sort of direction.
How’d
you find the film, both post-accident and on revisiting it?
Kathryn: It got a few laughs out of me—there is something funny about
seeing a group of crooks posing as children’s entertainers. Like any Aussie
comedy, there are a few digs at things that are familiar to us—we see Hammer on
the front cover of Women’s
Day, the group appear on Rove and
Bert Newton hosting an award night. Those are things that are (or at least
were) a familiar part of Australian culture and there’s something enjoyable
about seeing those things sent up. And The
Wannabes themselves share at least one or two parallels
with The Wiggles.
That
said, the film lacks something—I think they could have gone either way, made
the comedy even darker and pushed for an MA rating, or, conversely, aimed for a
PG rating by cutting back on the swearing and adding a few double entendres in
lieu of the sexual references, and either would have made a better film. As it
is, The Wannabes feels
like it’s stuck somewhere in the middle, with little idea of who its
target audience is. Ultimately, it’s the kind of movie that gets a 2 & ½
star rating for me. It’s funny, but it is lacking in places.
Ben: The popular culture references you mention above – Rove Live and Bert Newton
and The Wiggles by
way of Paul Jennings – do give the film a nostalgic time stamp; I’d also add
Costas Kilias’ characters affection for Kylie Minogue and the Red Faces-style
talent contest that opens the film. But yeah, it’s a film that’s tonally torn
that would have benefited from embracing a harder line of comedy or, as
you suggest, a lighter touch. The noughties was a decade of many
underwhelming local comedies, and while The
Wannabes isn’t as deadly as something like You and Your Stupid Mate or
as dreary as something like Takeaway or Russian Doll, it never
hits the upper tier.
Thanks again to Kathryn White for chiming in with her thoughts
on The Wannabes. You can read Kathryn’s daily musings over at Kathryn’s Inbox. In addition, Kathryn is the
author of 10 books, including Behind the Scenes, about a young actress who
lands a role on her dream television soap opera. Check out her published fiction over at Goodreads.