Eurovision Song Contest (the movie)

I watched it last night. The movie is way too long to begin with. Many of the acts, which might have been good for a laugh in snippets, go on for the entire duration of a song, thus dragging the film out for more than two hours. The basic thrust of the plot is almost completely predictable, and the jokes are too far apart. It’s an 80-minute comedy conveniently padded out with 45 minutes of bad singing.

The problem is that the Eurovision competition is one of those things that’s almost impossible to satirize, like Tiny Tim or The Gong Show, because it is already self-satirizing. It’s weird and campy and over-the-top. It’s more than a little creepy, and after all these decades, the acts still seem to take place in 1974. What can you really say about a contest where the contestants dream of being as good as ABBA? It’s like deciding to do stand-up in the hope of someday being as good as Pauly Shore.

Having noted all that, I’ll add that the woman who dubbed Rachel McAdams’s singing is pretty darned good, Demi Lovato has a solid cameo, Iceland looks like a pretty cool place, and I did get a few laughs from a weird sub-plot about how Icelandic elves are real.