The Problematics: ‘Kingpin’ Still Sports Quite A Mean Streak, Even 25 Years Later

Even though it was the immediate follow up to Dumb and Dumber, the 1996 film Kingpin feels very much outside of the Farrelly brothers’ peak cycle, which could be said to subsist of (with Dumber) Me, Myself & Irene, Shallow Hal, and Stuck on You. (We will not speak here of the misbegotten animated comedy Osmosis Jones.) That could be because while the other pictures self-consciously truck in ostensibly outrageous humor before revealing their contrived marshmallow hearts, Kingpin can be just downright mean before turning mushy — and also that it doesn’t turn particularly mushy.

Which imbues the movie with a particular kind of integrity. Ten years after Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, in which iconic cinema pool player “Fast” Eddie Felson (embodied by ultra-iconic movie star Paul Newman) took a young tyro (Tom Cruise) under his wing and on the road in pursuit of the big money, Peter and Bobby Farrelly transposed that narrative, rife with anecdotal incident and betrayals major and minor, and made the sport bowling instead of billiards. 

That’s funny enough in and of itself, and it’s also worth noting that this is two years before The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers’ exercise in making bowling a thing again. So you can’t say that the Farrellys didn’t have their finger on the pulse of something. 

Unlike a lot of Hollywood artistes who deign to contrive observances of the more lumpen corners of this American life, the Farrellys, hailing from the relatively hardscrabble environs of Cumberland, Rhode Island, brought some life experience to their evocation of small town life both sunny and dismal to their work here. The movie opens full of promise, with sunlight-dappled bowling practice with dad to disco-era amateur championship action. The bowler is Woody Harrelson’s Roy Munson, who soon goes pro without an escort. On his first tour he runs afoul of Ernie “Big Ern” McCracken, a shameless cheat who doesn’t like to lose and who leaves Roy to the mercy of some cheesed-off bowlers that Ern hustled. 

In The Hustler, the prequel to The Color of Money, Fast Eddie had his thumbs broken under not dissimilar circumstances. Still rather shockingly for a comedy, even a gross-out comedy, Roy has his bowling hand mutilated — shoved into a ball chute. After which there’s a cut to a woodchipper spewing chunks. Ew (but also another parallel to the Coens, whose 1996 film Fargo prominently featured this device in a very similar fashion). 17 years after, Roy has a hook for a hand which he camouflages, poorly, with a rubber hand on which he wears his amateur champion ring. An unsuccessful salesman of bowling alley peripherals — “How about some fluorescent condoms for novelty machine in the men’s room?” he asks a non-prospect — the paunchy, balding Roy lives in Hell and acts like it. He hires a guy to fake-mug his landlady and then gets out of paying his rent by fake-rescuing her. She gets her payback by taking the rent in trade — that is to say, sex with Roy.

Okay, this column is called “The Problematics” and you probably do not need much of a plot recap of this picture, given both its generic familiarity and the fact you probably saw it yourself a while ago. We’re here to examine how its gleefully offensive components play out 25 years later and I’ve got to say…actually not as badly as I might be expected to think, maybe? 

As I mentioned before, this movie largely takes place in downscale milieus. Once Roy convinces the Amish bowling tyro Ishmael (Randy Quaid) to hit the road to Reno and compete for a million dollar purse at a bowling tournament it’s all truck stop diners, strip bars and cheap motels, punctuated by a visit with a nouveau rich sleazebag who beats his girlfriend. And bowling alleys, which at this point in time were hardly hip. So much of the crass humor feels familiar to the environment. When Bill Murray’s McCracken snaps at a South Asian cab driver early in the movie “I’m sorry, did I wake you, Fatima?” it sounds, well, exactly like something this guy would say. And while the insult isn’t funny, the delivery can’t help but be, at least a little bit, because that’s what Murray does. 

The business between Roy and the landlord, played by the always remarkably game Lin Shaye, is of course a monumental bit of looksist humor. Shaye, in actual life not at all a gorgon, is made up to look especially grotesque, and the varicose-veined leg she draws a stocking up in a shot parodying The Graduate isn’t hers of course. The sex scene in the theatrical PG-13 version is minus a few extra-salty lines of dialogue (you can hear the “pump and dump” bit in the R-rated version, available on most physical media iterations of the movie) but it’s still…something. While it doesn’t make me laugh, I’m not offended by the scene; the hyperbole of it reminds me more of John Waters than anyone else. (While it’s true that Waters had more love for his freaks than maybe the Farrellys did, the edge was always there, especially in his earlier movies.) 

This being a Farrelly movie, the gags are fairly non-stop and some very predictable in their punchlines, as in Ishmael’s Amish paterfamilias informing Roy “We don’t have a cow.” This goes double, so to speak, when the voluptuous Vanessa Angel (as Claudia) enters the scenario and touches off a downpour of breast jokes. The worst of them comes in a fist fight between Roy and Claudia in which her now-prosthetic hooters punch back at Roy. 

Later in the movie, when Murray’s McCracken is reintroduced, and it’s revealed that he has already met the gambling adventuress Claudia, Big Ern notes “It’s a small world when you’ve got unbelievable tits.” Again, crass —this character is nothing but— but true to its milieu. 

Which underscores something I found kind of interesting when catching up with the picture. If you took out all the one-shot parodies of other movies and some of the more ridiculous sight gags (and there are a lot of them) there’s a genuinely credible narrative underneath. Even the redemption tale portion of it works, sort of. 

And if there’s one incredibly compelling reason that even very sensitive souls could look past the movie’s various sins in the realm of various “ism”s and “ist”s, it’s Bill Murray’s performance as Ern. He hasn’t a huge amount of screen time, but when he’s on the movie has an electricity that’s irreproducible. Now as then, this work represents the ne plus ultra of his Irredeemable Sleazebag mode. His Trump-aspirant combover flying all over the place as he gyrates his way into a one-on-one against Munson, his absolute irradiating contempt for everyone else in the world beaming from his every pore, Murray’s McCracken is an egomaniacal monster of the sort that’s only become more common since Kingpin premiered. And frankly that is the most disquieting thing about the movie today. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to watch Kingpin