Ed (1996)

In the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, there was a boom on a movie genre that nobody could have seen coming.  The genre was animals in sports.  There was the Air Bud series, in which a golden retriever played numerous sports.  There was the Most Valuable Primate series in which a chimpanzee played numerous sports.  The real beginning of this boom goes back to the year 1996 though, when a movie called Ed was released.

Ed was directed by Bill Couturié.  It starred Matt LeBlanc during his Friends days.  It also starred multiple people playing one chimpanzee by wearing an animatronic chimpanzee costume that did not look convincing.  The movie is about a minor league baseball team that brings on a chimpanzee as their third baseman.

The story of this movie could have been a whole lot better.  The story of Air Bud is better, and the core concept is nearly identical.  Change the animal and the sport and the same movie can be made.  The major issue is in how Ed was made.  The chimpanzee was not a real chimpanzee.  That removes the majority of the wonder from an animal playing the sport.  This is especially true when the substitute for the animal is not believable as the animal.  Not only was this an issue, but the way they wrote the Ed character turned the chimpanzee into an extremely intelligent, almost humanlike character.  Doing this fit with the sensibilities of the rest of the film but never felt true.  A chimpanzee that did not look like a chimpanzee yet had intelligence that was nearly human destroys any sense of reality.  An issue arises when this is brought into the baseball storyline of the movie.  The baseball stuff is grounded in some sort of reality.  The main character can throw the ball really fast, but that does not seem like too much of a stretch.  The chimpanzee does.  Though fitting with the comedic sensibilities of the movie, the character of Ed stands out in the baseball section as too outlandish for the story.

As was already said, the core concept of the movie is good.  A struggling baseball team enlists the help of their mascot, a chimpanzee, to help them win some games.  This is a story that could have some cute moments for animal lovers, some tense sports moments for sports fanatics, and a wholesome story for the family to enjoy.  Ed threw all of that stuff out the window.  The movie makes an attempt to be a comedy.  Most of the jokes fall flat or even induce groans.  The story of the struggling baseball team loses the heart behind it due to jokes, mostly related to the character of Ed.  It seems as though there were different ideas that did not fit together properly, but instead grated at each other.  It was as if the movie was a bone, fractured into many pieces, all scraping against each other.  Though, it did not hurt quite that much.  The pieces just did not come together in the way that they should have.

1996 was a fairly good year for movies.  There are lots of movies from that year that I like.  Ed was not one of those movies.  It could have been so much more than it turned out to be.  I have no hate for the movie, but whereas other movies of that time and that genre at least hit some emotional beat, Ed felt hollow and empty.  What bothers me is that it could have been better.  It could have been so much better.  But we were given this.

There are some notes that I would like to make:

• This is the first movie covered in the Sunday "Bad" Movie posts that was nominated for any Razzies.  It was nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Screen Couple.
• If you have any suggestions for bad movies, feel free to leave them in the comments, or message me on Twitter.