Movie Review: 'Impractical Jokers The Movie' is an Inside Joke

This review is a warning to those who are not already fans of Impractical Jokers: This movie version of the popular Tru TV prank show is not for you. Unless you are part of this cult shows fanbase already, there is nothing here for you beyond a few chuckles and a lot cringe based attempts at humor that fall flat as often as they earn a giggle.

I don’t care about Impractical Jokers. I tried, I really did. But the new Impractical Jokers The Movie, for me, was a slog. Yes, I laughed a couple of times but, for the most part, I found the movie to be a one note series of cringe pranks held together with the most inane plots imaginable. Why did this movie need a plot at all? Does the show have a plot? The movie centers its plot on a made up scenario surrounding Paula Abdul that plays like an in-joke between old friends that the rest of us are not privy to.

The story, such as it is, finds us traveling back in time to the early 1990’s. The jokers of the Impractical Jokers, Brian ‘Q’ Quinn, Joe Gatto, Sal Vulcano and James ‘Murr’ Murray, are playing young versions of themselves. The group is traveling to a Paula Abdul concert with no tickets. Using a ruse to get inside, the group find themselves backstage and able to approach Paula Abdul. This is where they discover that they can challenge each other to make fools of themselves for a good time.

Eventually, the boys destroy the entire concert with their antics and create a lifelong enemy out of Paula Abdul, after Joe hops on stage for the worst rendition of Forever Your Girl in history. For reasons that defy explanation, versions of Forever Your Girl play as the film score all the way through Impractical Jokers The Movie and each version used in the illustrates what I cannot stand about this style of humor, I don’t know if they are joking or not.

Paula Abdul is a lovely sport in her scenes as she comes back to the story to push the plot in motion. The story picks up with the grown up jokers at a Red Lobster when they see Paula Abdul again for the first time in 30 years. She doesn’t recognize them as the idiots who ruined her concert but as the Impractical Jokers and she’s a huge fan. She invites them to a party in Miami and they agree to attend.

However, Paula has left only 3 invitations to the party and there are four jokers. So the gang decides on a challenge: whoever loses doesn’t go to the party. On the drive from Staten Island to Miami, they will pull hidden camera pranks on people and, this part is a little vague, if the guys back out of a challenge they lose, if they push through their embarrassment to the end of the gag, they win?

I think that’s the premise here but it is laid out in such a clumsy fashion and doesn’t really matter anyway as the point is the humiliating challenges and not the actual outcome of a competition. Thus, the jokers hit the road and begin to humiliate themselves and unwitting bystanders from Staten Island to Miami for a prize they don’t appear to actually want or enjoy, I think. Again, the Paula Abdul stuff is awkward to the point of cringe. Is Paula the joke or is she in on the joke?

I know that none of this matters and that fans are more concerned about the prank challenges but the scenes intended to give context to the prank challenges are really terrible, to the point of being unwatchable. The Impractical Jokers may be bold in their willingness to humiliate themselves and others in their pranks but that boldness does not translate to acting in skits where they are stiff, dull and witless.

As for the pranks, they are hit and miss. I did laugh quite hard at a bit where the guys took Murr to a strip club in Atlanta and, when he was really enjoying himself, pulled a curtain revealing his entire extended family was watching him. But I do wonder what did this bit have to do with the rest of the challenge? Did Murr get a point for enduring that humiliation or was this a just for fun bit of improv pranking?

Other gags involve having the foursome approach strangers in Washington D.C and asking if they will listen to the eulogy they are going to read that day. While three of the four instruct the guy in the field through an earpiece as to what awful things he needs to say in order to humiliate himself and the person he’s talking to, the guy in the field is judged on how long he can keep it up until he taps out on the humiliation.

I do enjoy how this reveals the kindness in the people they approach who could not be more willing to be helpful even as the prank slowly dawns on them, they appear to want to see the best in the idiot who has approached them. Here’s hoping those lovely people on the Mall in Washington D.C who were approached by the Jokers were compensated for their effort in putting up with this stuff.

Those were the standout bits for me, but there were a few other laughs in Impractical Jokers The Movie for me but not nearly enough. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps, the cult of Impractical Jokers created a comedy standard that the group was never going to meet. I went in expecting to laugh loudly from beginning to end and found something akin to Jackass for older audiences.

Impractical Jokers The Movie left me cold. I laughed a few times, I got the gist of why the TV show has lasted for nearly 10 seasons, it’s cheap to make and seemingly easy to execute, but it’s definitely not for me. The humor, when outside of the pranks, is so inside baseball among the four guys that it felt impenetrable. Paula Abdul at one point says that she hated Season 5 of Impractical Jokers and this is delivered in a way that implies that this is a universal truth, as if the failure of Season 5 is common knowledge shared by the world. It is not.

Abdul herself is a confusing inclusion in Impractical Jokers The Movie. Do the guys actually like Paula Abdul? Does she actually like them? Was she the first or fifth choice to play the catalyst for this story as it is so nebulous it could be applied to any 90’s pop star and the jokes would hardly change. Is the joke at Paula Abdul’s expense? It’s a bit that is so far up its own backside it is impenetrable. And that is a rather good summation of much of the humor of Impractical Jokers The Movie.