Nate Bargatze’s dimwit dad film, The Breadwinner, is taking a beating with critics and appears to have suffered an even worse beatdown at the box office during its opening weekend.
By Sunday, Bargatze’s film was projected to earn an anemic $8 million over its May 29-31 opening weekend, a far cry from the $18 million that was predicted just weeks ago, ComingSoon reported.
Bargatze stars as Nate Wilcox, one of the local car dealer’s best salesmen. But when his wife (Mandy Moore) gets the opportunity to launch her own product line and takes off to develop it, Nate is left to care for the couple’s three daughters. And he is an utter disaster. He can’t do laundry, has no clue how to make toast, and doesn’t even understand how to buy eggs at the grocery store. It’s a familiar premise, certainly.
Speaking of familiar, the critics seem to have come to a consensus that the dopey, incompetent dad routine was done much better back in 1983 when Michael Keaton starred in Mr. Mom. And Bargatze’s stab at the storyline is just too bland to push it over the finish line.
For RogerEbert.com, for instance, Matt Zoller Seitz unfavorably compares The Breadwinner to Mr. Mom, and added that director Eric Appel’s previous comedy, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, is “a thousand times better than this.”
Movie Nation called the film a “Mister Mom wannabe,” and blasts Bargatze for his lack of acting skills, writing, “You stare at his flat expressions and look for signs of life behind those empty eyes and wonder how this ever got a green light.”
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone, which insisted that the movie is a straight out remake of Mr. Mom — but for those on “Xanax” — ripped the movie as making you “feel like you’re a consumer being sold a bill of goods” and is so bland you’ll have no trouble forgetting it.
The hits keep coming. For The Wrap, William Bibbiani rips The Breadwinner, saying that “Mr. Mom called, he wants his hackneyed premise back,” while the Boston Globe says that Bargatze “makes a mess of Mr. Mom.” And reviewer Brogan Luke Bouwhuis was so dour about the film, he said that Bargatze’s big feature film debut is so bad, it is a “family comedy for people who hate their families.”
Perhaps worse for The Breadwinner, the studio refused to screen the film for critics ahead of its opening. That is usually a sign that the distributor knows they have a dog on their hands.
It does feel that Bargatze is way out of date with his “incompetent dad” routine in a day and age where woke comedy has long been on the way out.
Bargatze is no neophyte, of course. He has spent decades building his persona from the ground up and has been extremely successful as a stand-up comedian. And that persona he has spent so many years crafting is, of course, that very incompetent, self-effacing dumb dad routine that everyone is blasting him for in his big screen debut. So it might seem odd that his hugely successful stand-up career didn’t seem to translate to the big screen in a film he actually wrote himself.
But the problem is, it’s all been done before. The befuddled dad character has been around since the 1970s when sitcoms and movies began to turn away from the Father Knows Best or the Mike Brady of the Brady Bunch template where dads were wise, loving, and are role models and toward the idiot dad who can’t do anything right because it’s “funny.” Further, the dumb dad archetype has become the focus of culture war criticism, too.
While Bargatze’s standup works very well for him onstage, it just might be that the incompetent dad character just won’t work anymore outside Bargatze’s concert stage. And that is probably a good thing.
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