Here is an amiably goofy, often funny music mockumentary – conceived on very familiar lines – devised by The Lonely Island, the comedy troupe Andy Samberg formed with his high school friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. In the last decade, they have become known for their viral online videos for US TV’s Saturday Night Live and also a funny feature-film, Hot Rod (2007).
Here, they play a horribly naff hip-hop boy band Style Boyz, who acrimoniously split, leaving Conner – played by Samberg – to pursue a super-hot solo career as rapper, appallingly named Conner4Real, while his two amigos languish in various forms of humiliating obscurity. What that inadvertently reveals about the famous Samberg and less famous Lonely Island colleagues I couldn’t say.
This comedy’s not exactly groundbreaking, and all the celeb cameos are a bit of a comedy humblebrag, but there are some reasonably sized laughs here and Ringo Starr gets a nice line on the subject of Conner’s uneasily heterosexual commitment to gay marriage.
