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Rejoice, Star Wars zealots and comic book geeks! Finally, after years of delays and reshoots and boycotts—not to mention page after page of nasty chatroom posts—Harvey (“Darth”) Weinstein has admitted defeat, giving the highly anticipated (and greatly debated) Fanboys a limited release—with its original plot intact. And I almost hate to admit it (for fear of inadvertently labeling myself a fangirl), but it was well worth the wait.
This lovably nerdy comedy stars Sam Huntington as Eric, a recovering comic book geek who’s been forced to grow up, put on a suit, and work for his car-dealing dad. In the process, he’s lost touch with his geeky high school friends. But when he runs into them at a Halloween party in 1998 and discovers that his old friend, Linus (Chris Marquette), is dying of cancer, he decides to organize the fanboy road trip of a lifetime.
With fewer than 200 days remaining until the release of The Phantom Menace, Eric and Linus set out—along with fellow fanboys Hutch (Dan Fogler) and Windows (Jay Baruchel)—on a cross-country mission to break into George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and steal a print of the long-awaited Star Wars prequel. Along the way, they take on a horde of militant Trekkies, meet up with Windows’s Internet girlfriend, and get some unexpected assistance from a surprising source.
Though Harvey Weinstein fought to cut the dying-friend plotline from the film, convinced that it was too depressing for a comedy, he really had nothing to fear. The topic is handled sensitively—and it helps to add some weight to the characters’ motivation. At the same time, though, it’s not such a major part of the film that it turns the whole thing into one big downer—because Fanboys isn’t really about the illness; it’s about the road trip. And what a road trip it is!
With its random side adventures and outrageous surprises, Fanboys may sound a bit like a Harold and Kumar movie—and, in a way, it is. Fortunately, though, despite the film’s occasional tendency toward mildly crude humor, these nerds on a mission are a whole lot funnier (and a lot less obnoxious) than their dope-smoking, road-tripping counterparts. They’re geeky and naïve and totally obsessed. But they’re also ridiculously entertaining.
For real-life fanboys, Fanboys is a geeky treat, with movie references and cameos galore. But you don’t have to be a true fanboy to enjoy it. Sure, the rest of you might miss a few geeks-only jokes, but if you’ve ever come into contact with a fanboy (and, really, who hasn’t?), you’re sure to laugh all the way to Skywalker Ranch and back.
So if Fanboys makes its way to a theater near you, be sure to pry your fanboy friends away from their role-playing games and their Star Wars fan sites (and make sure they turn off their iPhones) long enough to check out this lovably nerdy road trip / buddy flick. They’ll be so grateful that they might even let you look at their comic book collection (as long as you promise not to touch it).
