The Long Dumb Road (2018)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) Jason Mantzoukas has been a comedy MVP for a few years now, always brightening and spicing movies even in small roles. Now here’s The Long Dumb Road to give him a leading role. As befit Mantzoukas’ screen persona, it’s a bigger-than-life role as an explosive, impulsive live-in-the-moment drifter who ends up changing the course of a young earnest sheltered young man on his way to his first year of college in Los Angeles. The Long Dumb Road, as it becomes apparent early on, is the kind of comedy film where the characters get in deeper and deeper trouble until they learn a valuable life lesson along the way. But the point here isn’t the greater story as much as the comic sketches encountered along the way, with character actors playing the obstacles in the leads’ way. There isn’t anything startlingly new here, nor is it all that hilarious—but, of course, that will depend on your tolerance for humiliation comedy. Still, The Long Dumb Road is a short, effective comedy even if the ending doesn’t quite bring everything together.