Roberts’s Film Review: The Chaperone - “Doofus Son-in-Law’s Straight-to-DVD” Movie Highlights WWE Films’s Confused Approach

By Alex Roberts, PWTorch Review Specialist

About five months after its original premiere, WWE Films’s "The Chaperone" has re-surfaced in a most dubious manner. Since its release, its star, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, has become WWE’s storyline Chief Operating Officer. Meanwhile, C.M. Punk has ushered in what he’s declaring the “Reality Era” through his “worked shoot” promos, sprinkling in personal and backstage references to the usual pro wrestling posturing. Throughout these promos, one reference has remained constant - whenever he needs to get under the COO’s skin, Punk simply reminds Hunter of his “breakout role” in the film. It seems that even WWE is willing to admit that The Chaperone was a complete embarrassment.

With such an abysmal reception, what might be the biggest surprise while watching The Chaperone is that it’s not quite the useless disaster that a viewer has every right to expect. Yes, there’s no doubt that it was a failure financially and as an attempt to turn Levesque into a breakout leading man, while the film itself is unsuccessful in finding a suitable tone and rhythm for its family-oriented target audience. Despite all this, The Chaperone is at least an interesting mess, filled with enough odd moments and idiosyncrasies to make it more entertaining than the usual banal, direct-to-DVD fare.

Ray Bradstone (Levesque) has just been released from federal prison “a changed man” after serving seven years for his part in a jail robbery. His attempts to stay on the straight and narrow keep faltering, though. His ex-wife (Annabeth Gish) has found someone new, his daughter Sally (Ariel Winter) is now in middle school and wants nothing to do with him, and every attempt to find a job ends in failure. Finally, Ray has no choice but to accept the role as driver for a bank heist from former crime partner LaRue (Kevin Corrigan). During the heist, though, Ray has revelation and flees the scene to chaperone Sally’s field trip to New Orleans. LaRue, thinking Ray set him up, follows the bus in hot pursuit.

If this plot sounds just a bit, well, off, The Chaperone is just getting started with its head-scratching moments. Tonally, the film is a complete mess - the light, family caper comedy that a viewer rightly expects never really materializes. The comedic intentions of nearly every scene are undercut entirely by fatally mistimed punchlines and by an oppressive, overly serious thriller-style film score that booms nonstop throughout. Ray’s antagonists, meanwhile, shift violently from comedic relief to real menace almost from one scene to another. One moment LaRue is a bug-eyed, wacky villain crashing his car into a truck full of dirty diapers; the next he’s waving a pistol and viciously threatening Ray and his kin. It’s never clear what’s supposed to be funny and what’s supposed to be serious, making for a viewing experience that’s bizarre to say the least.

At the same time, though, it’s the sense of bizarre eccentricity throughout that saves The Chaperone from being a completely by-the-numbers exercise. Credit - or blame - director Stephen Herek, whose past films include cult favorites "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure" and "Critters," for adding unexpected, welcome touches to the barebones concept. See, for instance, how Ray relies on the advice of “Marjorie,” a self-help radio personality, when preparing for big moments in his life.

There’s subtle, genuine humor in seeing the muscular Levesque repeating Marjorie’s platitudes to prepare himself for stressful moments. In another scene, LaRue and his accomplices rob a bank while wearing masks of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice. It holds a lot less political heft than it sounds like it should, but nevertheless offers a welcomed, strange, gleefully inappropriate curveball.

“Inappropriate,” in fact, might be the perfect word to describe The Chaperone in a number of ways. This might best be seen in the film’s overall dim view of modern society, particularly its youth. For a film targeted to a preteen demographic (and filled with the type of marketable pop music you’d hear in a Disney Channel feature), it’s odd to see a film that treats that demographic with such cynicism and cruelty. All but a few of Sally’s schoolmates are grotesque, self-absorbed, hateful caricatures. One girl sneaks away from the field trip and - in an incredible display of bad taste by the filmmakers - gets Botox injections in her lips, leaving her lisping and horrifyingly deformed. Others are uniformly noisy, violent, and hooked up thoughtlessly to their iPods. Meanwhile, all of the school’s authority figures (except Ray, of course) are fat, timid, impotent, and utterly useless.

Despite this bizarre cynicism, there are still a few pleasant surprises to be had - not the least of which is the revelation that The Chaperone isn’t simply the Triple H ego piece most wrestling fans might expect. Levesque is the center of the film, yes, but the film doesn’t go out of its way to “get him over,” as it were. In particular, there is a genuine father-daughter chemistry between Levesque and Winter that works well throughout; overall, The Game comes across as extremely likeable and fills the role of leading man believably.

Any upside the film offers, though, feels utterly futile compared to the larger picture - that is, that The Chaperone is a perfect example of WWE Films’s confused approach to making and marketing their films. It’s a film quite literally without an audience - one marketed to WWE’s younger fans, but so strangely put together that I simply couldn’t imagine any family hazarding a second- if that - viewing. For the family-oriented nature of the film’s format, much of The Chaperone ranges from risqué to downright cruel. What kind of a family film ends, as The Chaperone does - and I’m not making this up - with its hero telling a joke about prison rape?

If the role of a film critic is simply to offer a guide for which films to see and which to avoid, I can say with confidence that no, I wouldn’t recommend a family with small children seek out The Chaperone. For all that can be said about mediocre-to-awful WWE Films offerings like Kane’s "See No Evil," John Cena’s "12 Rounds," or "Stone Cold" Steve Austin’s "The Condemned," these films all at least had a clear target audience and fulfilled that audience’s expectation (namely, that there would be gore and/or violence). This film, meanwhile, offers just about everything except the comedy and uplift that it promises.

The Chaperone isn’t the only WWE film released recently with this type of identity crisis (what segment of the WWE Universe, for instance, was clamoring to see Randy Orton in a coming-of-age period piece like That’s What I Am?); nevertheless, it feels like the perfect symbol of all that’s wrong with the company’s recent “PG” film-making approach. There are a handful of theories as to why this experiment has failed so spectacularly. Perhaps people simply do not care to see this type of entertainment from a wrestling brand; perhaps it’s because these films have almost all been universally panned by critics.

Oddly, a similar cross-demographic malaise has been the centerpiece of recent WWE television and has been met with far different results. A conscious effort has been made recently to give fans the choice to cheer for either the clean-shaven, PG babyface John Cena or the more rebellious, angry C.M. Punk. I believe this strategy has worked with WWE's audience so far and been well received by most fans and wrestling analysts. From my view, there is a glimmer of hope that the dawn of the so-called “Reality Era” could end up offering something for every type of wrestling fan - young and old, hardcore and casual. WWE Films, on the other hand, currently fails to deliver anything to anyone.

At the end of the day, though, it might be as simple as stating that WWE should stick to creating a wrestling product rather than trying to make a film. Wrestling as excellent as Cena and Punk’s recent series of matches cannot help but garner interest and accolades. A film as clunky, bizarre, and just plain off-the-mark as The Chaperone, meanwhile, feels destined to become a punchline. Sorry, Mr. COO, but this one’s going to take quite a while to live down.

The Chaperone (director Stephen Herek, 2010): 2/4

Want to discuss wrestling, film, or wrestling in film? Send me a tweet at twitter.com/roqnrollmartian!

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