Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant (2015)

(On Cable TV, December 2018) I mourn certain movie subgenres, and one of those nearest to my cinephile’s heart is the kind of rapid-fire spoof comedy that Zucker-Abrams-Zucker used to do so well in the 1980s. I’m not mourning the degenerate form of the subgenre that plagued the 2000s, but sometime I miss their sheer frantic pacing, aiming for a joke every ten seconds or so. Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant is far from being an ideal comedy, but it certainly has the right intentions. It attempts a joke every fifteen seconds—alas, only one in ten will land. That still gives viewers a laugh every few minutes, which is not that bad. Not spoofing any movie in particular, Larry Gaye focuses on the eponymous flight attendant and how he reacts when his airline announces plans to replace human attendants with robot ones. Of course, plot is merely pretext here for stringing along one silly gag after another. Most of them are unsuccessful, and the script is to blame: from the get-go, even the Larry Gaye character is ill-defined hovering between oblivious obnoxiousness and ultra-competence. For someone supposed to be the best flight attendant in the world, Gaye doesn’t achieve his full comic potential. It’s not lead actor Mark Feuerstein’s fault, though, as he does his best to wring every laugh out of the raw material. Speaking of casting, Larry Gaye features one a surprisingly good cast: In between various walk-on roles, we get Stanley Tucci, Taye Diggs, Danny Pudi, Henry Winkler, Rebecca Romijn and others. While the overall result is definitely more miss than hit, there’s an attempt in Larry Gaye at a silly comedy the likes of which we rarely get to see any more.