Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show

The aims of Vince Vaughn’s project were simple: collect some up-and-coming comics, take them on the road for a 30-day cross-country tour, pattern it all after the Wild West shows of yore and hire Ari Sandel to tape the action and some behind-the-scenes confessions. Alas, it really isn’t worth all the effort — the comedians almost all turn out to be the kind of macho drips who sneer at the thought of an apple martini, and the interplay offstage too often veers into the kind of inarticulate sentimentality that men use to offset their aggression. There are guest appearances by Justin Long, Jon Favreau and Peter Billingsley (the latter two long in the Vaughn back-slapping coterie), and a few tourist stops on the way, but mostly we’re trapped in a bus with a bunch of uninteresting people and their few vaguely interesting quirks. True, there are some traumatic confessions, such as the participant whose older brother died of AIDS and the poverty of some of the others, but though the film inches to a point in detailing the trial-by-racism of Arab comedian Ahmed Ahmed, it’s scotched by the brevity of the film and the randomness of the darker material. All said, this a far-from-epochal event rendered with a casual offhand nature that could be mistaken for indifference and shouldn’t fill many people with mirth or emotion. Extras include a couple of filmmaker/participant commentaries, ten profiles of the performers and various guest spots, and three behind-the-scenes clips with semi-interesting material that really should have been included in the film proper.