THE CABLE GUY (1996)

THE CABLE GUY (1996)

Tagline: There's No Such Thing as Free Cable

(Comedy, Drama, What Is Cable Again?) [PG--13]

I have a list here of every cable installer fired in the last four years. Check out some of these names: Murray Slaughter, George Jetson, Jean Luc Picard, there's even a guy who liked to be called "The Big Ragu".

In this story, Steven Kovak is moving into a new apartment and needs cable. He ends up getting a cable guy named Chip who ends up giving him free cable. Steven gives him $50 for it and Chip takes that as a friendship invite. When it becomes clear that Steven is not going to be friends with him, Chip decides to take steps to ruin Steven’s life. 

The main thing I remember about this movie when it came out was that I didn’t see it because I had zero interest in checking it out. I did finally end up watching it last week. To be honest, there are only a handful of movies that Jim Carrey has been in that I am a fan of. YES MAN and both the SONIC films are 3 of them. However, I did like Jim Carrey’s rendition of “Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane and actually did see the MTV video for it. By the way, in case you were wondering MTV stopped playing music videos 24/7 around the year 2001. They played their last music video in 2016. 

Jim Carrey’s (SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2) performance as Chip is pretty much standard Carrey at the time. You can tell there is a little bit of heart there, but he’s also a jerk with pretty much zero regards for anyone else unless it suits his purpose. From what I understand Carrey was paid a massive $20 million for the role while his co-star Matthew Broderick (FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF) got around $2 million. Granted, $2 million is a crazy amount of money, but I found that pay difference pretty insane given that Matthew wasn’t all that far removed from staring in one of the biggest comedies of the ’80s. We also get a few other major stars in this film including Jack Black (GOOSEBUMPS), Ben Stiller (THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY), Eric Roberts (APE VS MONSTER), Owen Wilson (WEDDING CRASHERS), Janeane Garofalo (MYSTERY MEN). However, none of them play any of the movie's leads. That role was given to Leslie Mann (THE BUBBLE), who does a fantastic job as Robin Harris. 

Getting to the good stuff about this movie is just that it’s a blast from the past. It reminds me of a day when cable was king and if you just had network TV, you were missing out on a lot. Yeah, that was me. I missed out on a lot. My dad did have cable, but pretty much kept it on sports 90% of the time and we only saw him every other weekend. This is also one of the movies from the ’90s that had a spectacular soundtrack all around featuring the likes of Jefferson Airplane mentioned earlier, Filter, Lenny Kravitz, and more. I also liked Jack Black’s character in this as Rick. He seemed to be the only person aside from Robin that wasn’t absolutely annoying. Another thing that worked was the actual story. Yes, everyone is annoying for the most part, but that is the goal of this film. It’s a comedy and on that level, it works pretty well for the most part. 

Where this thing kind of gets off the rails is in some of the humor. I would rather they just skipped the entire basketball scene once they found out in real life that Jim Carrey could barely even dribble a ball. It seems like a lot of weird effort to go through just to include a scene where it makes us dislike everyone even more. Having said that, this thing doesn’t have any major issues. 

Overall this thing is pretty tame while being significantly weird at the same time and that gives this a bit of a balance that works for the most part, but it didn’t land at the box office when compared to some other films Jim Carrey starred in at the time. Chris Farley was actually considered for the role of Chip, and I would much rather have seen him in this instead of Carrey. With all that said, this thing is a 4 out of 7. It has its moments but if you are hiring Janeane Garofalo you give her MYSTERY MEN time, not 5 seconds. 

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