Rando! Bending the Rules (2012)

If you’re anything like me, you continually find yourself asking the eternal question, “What is a classy, distinguished actor/actress doing in hot garbage like this?” 

The easy, cynical answer is that the gifted thespian in question is picking up a much needed paycheck by slumming, that they are engaging in the time-honored capitalist tradition of prostituting talent and time in exchange for cold hard cash. 

That answer has the benefit of being true but it’s equally true that actors, particularly character actors of a certain age, appear in bad movies unworthy of their extraordinary talent because that’s what they do.

Actors act. For real actors, acting is not just a profession: it’s a way of life. It’s who they are on an existential level. Actors can’t not act. It’s as natural for them as breathing and eating and sleeping. There’s something beautiful about that. 

That explains what Phillip Baker Hall, one of the greatest character actors of all time and an essential component of all-time classics like Secret Honor, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia is doing playing Jamie Kennedy’s dementia-ridden father in the direct to video, WWE-produced low-budget buddy cop comedy Bending the Rules, a vehicle for WWE superstar Adam “Edge” Copeland, whose cinematic oeuvre we recently explored earlier this month in Money Plane. 

Character actors innate need to act, no matter how dodgy or undeserving the project, also helps explain why Hall’s wife and Kennedy’s mother is played by the equally over-qualified Jessica Walter of Archer and Arrested Development fame.

I was tempted to watch and write about Bending the Rules because it was eighty minutes long, a buddy cop movie, a vehicle for a professional wrestler and was filmed in New Orleans for maximum local color. 

It looked like the lightest, most featherweight bit of escapist fluff I could possibly waste my time watching and writing about. I was right. Bending the Rules is the kind of disposable nonsense you begin forgetting about before it’s even over. 

The only thing in Bending the Rules that makes any kind of an impression is Hall’s haunting and powerful portrayal of a proud man facing his own mortality and staring down the looming specter of death. 

In a WWE buddy comedy! Starring a wrestler professionally known as “Edge” and the star of Son of the Mask, Roe V. Wade and The Hungover Games! 

Kennedy won the acting lottery with Bending the Rules. He signed up to play an uptight lawyer in a dumb action-comedy vehicle for a wrestler and ended up having multiple dramatic father and son scenes with one of the greatest character actors in film history. 

Kennedy rises to the challenge of sharing the screen with a legend like Hall. There’s a wonderful overhead shot early in the film of father and son lying on a bed together and sharing a moment and it’s borderline uncanny how much Hall and Kennedy resemble each other. 

It’s entirely possible that the character Hall plays was written as a broad comic character; a doddering, senile, perpetually confused old man who can’t quite get anything straight. But Hall does not play the character for laughs. He gives the character dignity and substance and gravity in a movie otherwise contemptuous of those qualities.

Instead it’s a moving dramatic performance from an actor who commits to the role and the film as if it were another collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson and not a paycheck gig in a silly wisp of a movie. 

In yet another non-star-making performance, the charisma-impaired Copeland stars as Detective Nick Blades. If Casual Friday became sentient it would look and act an awful lot like Blades, with his Kevin Smith-like penchant for wearing shorts outside despite being a grown man. 

Kennedy’s Assistant District Attorney Theo Gold wants to put the beefy cop behind bars for corruption before his own life unravels quickly and dramatically and he loses damn near everything he has. The uptight attorney’s wife leaves him, taking the children. He loses his home. He loses his standing in society and he loses his beloved automobile “The Hawk”, a beautifully preserved classic that occupies a place of supreme importance in the straight arrow lawyer’s life and his relationship with his dentist father. 

In time-honored mismatched buddy cop tradition, fate throws these two enemies together in a madcap bid to stay alive and uncover a nefarious plot that threatens both of their lives. Enemies become unlikely allies and then something more because this is a mismatched buddy cop movie not a mismatched casual acquaintance involved in law enforcement motion picture. 

Bending the Rules is about as short as a movie can be and still qualify as feature-length yet it devotes a bewilderingly vast percentage of its runtime to a plot it would be better off ignoring or treating as little more than an excuse for crackling set-pieces and one-liners. 

After getting the old heave-ho from his wife as part of a series of comic humiliations that are sad but never funny Kennedy shares his scenes with either Copeland, a bland blonde beefcake without much in the way of personality, and Hall, a film legend of staggering power and depth, who can take a nothing role in a flimsy trifle like this and make a three course meal out of it. 

Kennedy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more engaged and alive when acting opposite the star of Secret Honor than the WWE Hall of Famer. Walter and Hall aren’t the only crazily over-qualified ringers in the cast. 

Jennifer Esposito does her damnedest in a perversely thankless cop role but when your resume includes sharing the screen with Dana Carvey during the infamous “Turtle Club” scene in Master of Disguise you grow immune to guilt and shame. 

Esposito is an actress acting in Bending the Rules. I don’t begrudge her or any of the other real actors in the movie a paycheck courtesy of Vince McMahon. 

Bending the Rules is one of those annoyingly predictable movies where you can figure out who the secret villain is because he or she is a name actor or actress with perplexingly little to do until the climactic reveal. 

So, basically it’s Alicia Witt as a duplicitous back-stabbing colleague of Kennedy’s. Oh, c’mon. You were not going to watch fucking Bending the Rules! I doubt that you’re tempted to give it a whirl even if it requires next to nothing in the way of concentration or focus or emotional investment. 

Honestly, you can have it on in the background while you do dishes or vacuum or listen to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music at a deafening volume and you won’t miss anything except for Hall’s remarkable performance in a movie utterly unworthy of him. 

Having watched multiple Copeland vehicles for Wrestling Month I think I can safely say that he doesn’t have much of a future as an actor. The same cannot be said of Philip Baker Hall, thank God, who also has an extraordinary history as an actor as well. 

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