Lionsgate
Prank shows are nothing new. The format didn’t even start with the advent of television. Pioneering prankster Allen Funt founded the genre in 1947 with The Candid Microphone and moved to television in 1948 as the long-running hidden camera show Candid Camera. The format was expanded upon in 2000 when Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of pranksters began Jackass on MTV. The show retained the basic hidden camera format, but amped up the pranks with extreme physical stunts. Newer prank shows like Scare Tactics and Fameless put unsuspecting people (who have often been set up by their friends) into outrageous situations all for the entertainment of the viewing public.
The internet, particularly YouTube, has offered an outlet to anyone with a video camera to produce and post their own prank videos, allowing them to hone their skills in the hopes that Hollywood will come calling while gaining millions of views for their videos. It appears just that scenario has come true for YouTubers Roman Atwood, Dennis Roady, and Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, who have a collective 28 million subscribers and over three billion views for their individual videos.
The three have joined forces, pooled their talents and have produced a feature-length prank film, Natural Born Pranksters, which follows the same basic formula of the Jackass movies. The three set up elaborate pranks to capture the reactions of their unsuspecting victims. The question is, are any of the pranks actually funny?
The answer is yes and no. You kind of feel like you may be in trouble when the very first prank involves each of the guys getting a massage and sporting a fake erection in the process (although it seems Vitaly may be getting pranked in the process). Some pranks are very uncomfortable to watch, such as when a man is called to his house by his nine-months pregnant wife and arriving to find her having already given birth. To a black baby. He’s white, she’s Asian … and then the black mailman shows up. The poor guy is speechless and in shock, so whether the prank is actually funny depends upon the viewer’s tolerance for that level of discomfort.
The guys also like to prank each other, just like the Jackass crew, with exploding barrels of muck and confetti, and the movie finishes off with a pretty spectacular prank involving a Human Cannonball — with a pretty predictable set-up and a horrifyingly funny climax. The rest of the movie is a very mixed bag with a few chuckles, one or two laugh-out-loud moments, and more than a few “trying too hard” pranks that just fall flat. Ironically, the funniest moments in the entire movie are the more popular of their YouTube videos sprinkled throughout the movie.
That seems to be the biggest problem with Natural Born Pranksters — these guys a very funny in small doses, pulling off their own elaborate pranks without studio legal teams telling them what they can and cannot do. Even with those types of constraints, the Jackass movies have still managed to be consistently funny more often than not, even if you feel terrible afterwards for laughing at their antics. Here, you just feel terrible because the guys are trying way too hard to pull off big, elaborate pranks that they just don’t have the same experience doing. Pretending to break into a car and smash items like a laptop while other people watch really isn’t funny, and sometimes the people seem to be thinking this is a prank. There isn’t much finesse to the situations to make them totally believable in a lot of cases.
But, the trio was given the opportunity to produce a feature film, and it has gone straight to video and streaming on April 1st. This is no joke. Lionsgate has released a standard DVD of the movie loaded with trailers for other Lionsgate movies but little else except the movie itself. No outtakes, no bloopers, no extra features whatsoever. It’s a lackluster presentation for a lackluster film, but if you really, really like these guys and their YouTube videos, you may be interested in checking out their movie.
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