One of my favorite comedy actors is Charlie Day and I was really excited for his directorial debut Fool’s Paradise back in 2023. However because of its poor reviews and the fact it never released in the UK, I never saw it… until this weekend, when I discovered it had been added to Prime Video.
Day stars in Fool’s Paradise as a child-like mute man who’s kicked out of his mental hospital into the streets of Los Angeles, where he’s discovered due to bearing a resemblance to an unruly method actor and becomes a stand-in for the man. Quickly his career blossoms and then bottoms out in what’s clearly a whistle-stop satire of the Hollywood movie business, as he builds a friendship with a down-on-his-luck publicist.
Unfortunately, the movie was poorly reviewed, with 20% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. People criticized the apparent lack of humor in the movie, which just doesn’t make sense to me.
That’s because I really, really liked Fool’s Paradise; admittedly, my expectations were low because of the reviews, but I still found it a fun film that made me laugh more than most other ‘comedies’ I’ve seen on streaming.
Lots of this comes from the cast, with even bit-actors getting one or two funny or weird characterisations, but there were loads of smart details added to dramatic scenes to keep the tone consistent; I really enjoyed a scene on a movie set where assistants kept appearing to offer famous stars a chair to sit on.
You could also make a drinking game out of the movie for how prolific it is with cameos. Day’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia cast mates like Glenn Homerton, David Hornsby, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Artemis Pebdani and Jimmi Simpson appear briefly as do John Malkovich, Ray Liotta, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Dean Norris, Jillian Bell and Comon. That’s not even counting the ‘proper’ cast: Ken Jeong as down-on-his-luck publicist Lenny, who’s basically the co-star of the movie, as well as Kate Beckinsale as an actress who marries the main character and Adrien Brody as a rival actor.
The movie’s just charming as well, with Day showing his love of the history of Hollywood by channeling silent-movie Buster Keaton style comedy and style as much as modern-day Big Lebowski-esque plotting.
I can understand some criticism of the movie; the main character doesn’t really have any agency or goal throughout and in some movies, that can be an issue. But in Fool’s Gold the world of the story is active enough to compensate (as is Jeong’s character, who’s the heart of the story), and otherwise it’s narratively solid as a rags-to-riches story.
With how much absolute dross is put onto streaming services on a daily basis, I just can’t understand how a movie made with so much passion and heart can get just 20% on Rotten Tomatoes (for context, I just gave up on an absolutely terrible Netflix crime series which has a head-scratching 83% on the site, ditching it because it felt so generic and mindless). It may not be the perfect movie but Fool’s Paradise deserves a much better score and 90 minutes of your time during your next movie night.
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