THE STORY – Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong discuss their lifelong friendship and popularity as a comedic duo. Features interviews, sketches and never-before-seen footage spanning their five-decade career.
THE CAST – Cheech Marin & Tommy Chong
THE TEAM – David Bushell (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 123 Minutes
Early in the new film, “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie,” Cheech Martin, 78, and Tommy Chong, 86, are aimlessly driving across the California desert when Cheech suddenly asks, “Is this a doc or a movie?” “I don’t know, man,” Chong replies, an honest response. The problem is that we don’t quite know when the film concludes two hours later.
Directed by David Bushell, “Last Movie” utilizes various tools to tell the comic duo’s story, from extensive archival footage and black-and-white animation to contemporary interviews and staged sequences inside their car. While elements of this mixture are individually interesting and, at times, powerful, others come across as superfluous and, at times, even cringe, making for an uneven blending of storytelling techniques.
To be sure, most of the film is non-fiction based, relying on archival material from the team’s individual childhoods and early adult years. Tommy, for example, was born in Canada, the product of a frowned-upon mixed marriage, and as a result, he always felt like an outsider until one fateful night when he saw jazz great Ornette Coleman perform and discovered both jazz and weed. He joined a successful band (Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers) and, in the process, co-wrote the hit song “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” When Bobby split for a solo career, the band disbanded, and Tommy returned to Vancouver, where he bought a strip club.
For his part, Cheech (born Richard Anthony Marin) shared Tommy’s feelings of alienation. Born in South Central L.A., he was one of the few Chicanos in his overwhelmingly Black neighborhood, and being a little guy, sought to protect himself by using humor as a weapon. After college (where he too was introduced to pot), Cheech intensified his protests against the Vietnam War, but once he lost his student deferment, he fled to Canada. There, he met Tommy, who had turned his strip club into a “hippie burlesque,” with improv comedy scheduled between the acts. When the strip club folded, the improv group dispersed, leaving only Cheech & Chong, who decided to team up on their own.
After a series of low or non-paying gigs, the boys got their big break when record company mogul Lou Adler caught their routine and signed them to a recording contract. Touching on this, the film falls back on the usual rise-and-fall-and-rise structure of most show business docs. Of these scenes, however, the material involving Adler is the most intriguing. Once signed to Adler’s label, Cheech & Chong initially had no idea how to take what was primarily a visual act and make it funny to listeners. Once they worked together to crack the code, Adler aggressively promoted their albums, which led to huge sales and a 1974 Grammy. Adler, who had also become a successful movie producer, believed film would be the next logical step, so after securing a distribution deal with Paramount, he directed their debut film, “Up in Smoke” (1978), which became an unexpected blockbuster, earning $104 million on a $2 million budget. The film proved to be one of Cheech & Chong’s greatest successes, but it also planted the seeds of what was to become the team’s eventual undoing.
The Adler story, however, is only a part of the film’s overstuffed second act, which is padded with too many movie clips and promotional television interviews. While a few of the talk show appearances garner a laugh or, if you look closely, a guarded moment of tension between the two, many offer little more than variations of the same talking points, and their sheer volume leads to diminishing returns with each subsequent appearance.
Bushell has structured the film as a reminiscence between Cheech & Chong, as they recall highlights of their life and career while careening across the desert. Yet for the first two acts, their dialogue feels overly scripted, punctuated with painfully unfunny bits of business between them that play like a pale imitation of the kind of car conversations that were often the highlights of their more successful films. Whether it’s searching for an available joint or combing the car for a lost gummy, these bits drain the energy from the film and stop any narrative momentum the archival clips have generated. The boys are game, but the material just isn’t there.
Then suddenly, somewhere early in the third act, the script is seemingly tossed out the car window, and the men get down to what’s really on their minds, airing the grievances and resentments that prompted their two-decade professional estrangement. In Cheech’s eyes, when Tommy took over as director of their films in 1980, he stopped collaborating with his partner and slowly relegated Cheech to the role of actor, depriving him of any creative input whatsoever. Tommy remembers the circumstances somewhat differently. When the team parted ways with Adler, Tommy felt that someone else needed to take the reins of their career and that it should be one of them to protect their legacy.
The argument gets raw and is often genuinely riveting, with Cheech expressing his deep hurt at the slight, but these moments land because every exchange between the men feels real. Amid all the old clips and scripted bits, these scenes are the first time the film breaks through and justifies its reason for being rather than existing as a simple exercise in nostalgia. The men have since reconciled – hence their participation in the movie – but it’s clear that the wounds haven’t fully healed. Yet, just at the moment when we’ve finally become fully invested, Bushell breaks the mood with another scripted bit, which ends the film on a disappointingly flat note.
One valuable service that “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” provides is a reminder of just how funny the comic team was in their heyday, providing thoughtful social commentary behind their hilarious weed jokes. Sadly, if Cheech & Chong stays true to the film’s title and makes this their last movie, it strikes a disappointing note on which to end this talented duo’s cinematic career.
