Black Sheep - *

Black Sheep is an innefective pseudo-sequel to Tommy Boy, that plays like one long, worn out, Saturday Night Live skit. Chris Farley plays Mike Donnelly, the bumbling brother of gubernatorial candidate Al Donnelly (Tim Matheson). Of course, Mike can’t do anything right. All he wants to do is help his brother, but manages to fumble from one disastrous media moment to another. Finally, an ambitious aide, Steve Dodds (David Spade), is assigned to keep Mike out of trouble, and out of the media’s eye. Yet, disaster follows the pair, even when exiled to a remote backwoods county. Unfortunately, Black Sheep is every bit as disastrous as one of Mike’s fiascos. Whereas Tommy Boy belted out every possible joke it could imagine, with no confidence in itself, Black Sheep tends to focus and linger on situations which aren’t nearly as funny as they should be. It is one long, drawn out exercise in pain. Of the two leads, Farley gets what little laughs there are. Spade would merely be an object of pity, if he weren’t so sarcastically annoying. Director Penelope Spherris does little to make her presence felt, engaging the movie on autopilot. Throwing Farley and Spade into wacky situations may be enough to cause a few reflex chuckles, but they needed to think twice before framing another entire movie around it.

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