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By Robert Scucci
| Published
One of my favorite guilty pleasure movies is 2004’s Without a Paddlestarring Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, and Dax Shepard. The film follows the same kind of beats you’d find in any coming-of-age story, except it’s about a bunch of 30-year-olds having an early midlife crisis while hunting for a long-lost treasure their recently deceased friend spent his life trying to locate. It’s stupid, slapstick, and the furthest thing from what most people would call good cinema, but it’s entertaining, and I love it.
A worthy spiritual successor to Without a Paddle2012’s Nature Calls offers a lot of the same kind of humor, but with an R-rating. That means more cussing, fighting, and even some good old-fashioned lost-in-the-wilderness nakedness to keep things interesting. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is absolutely stacked with talent, including, but not limited to, Patton Oswalt, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Riggle, Patrice O’Neal, and Maura Tierney.
Everybody in Nature Calls reliably does what you know them to do, and their chemistry is exactly what you’d expect. I enjoyed watching it play out because I’m a fan of everybody involved. The story itself, though? There’s really not much going on, and you’ll soon realize the initial conflict is just a launching pad for joke after joke, some of which land better than others.
Watch This One For The Talent, Not The Plot
I’m not so much of a curmudgeon that I can’t appreciate a movie that doesn’t do much but still manages to be funny. But I’m still going to call Nature Calls what it is: a giant nothingburger.
Here’s the story: Randy Stevens (Patton Oswalt) is a loyal Boy Scout who wants to make his elderly father, a former troop leader now living in assisted living, proud. He wants to take all of the neighborhood kids on an epic camping trip, but his brother Kirk (Johnny Knoxville) is basically a tech bro who wouldn’t be caught dead camping in the woods. Randy, in a moment of passion, kidnaps all of the kids sleeping over at Kirk’s house and takes them camping anyway.
Kirk doesn’t want to go down without a fight, so he brings his trigger-happy security guard, Gentry (Rob Riggle), and Mr. Caldewell (Patrice O’Neal) to the campgrounds to collect the boys and bring them back to their sleepover party, complete with dozens of TVs and video games, at his McMansion. Hilarity ensues.
You Can Choose To Vibe With This One
The rest of Nature Calls involves Randy getting into a series of accidents despite his immense knowledge of the outdoors, Kirk getting his ass handed to him in ways only Johnny Knoxville can endure, Rob Riggle making that face he always makes before saying something he thinks is funny, and, my favorite part, Patrice O’Neal being highly inappropriate because he doesn’t know how to carry himself around kids.
The combination of funny people is enough to carry a movie like Nature Calls from start to finish, to the point that the setting and conflict barely matter. This could have taken place at a bowling alley or a theme park, or the characters could have been kidnapped and needed to escape. Anything, really. It just so happens they’re lost in the woods and braving the elements here.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but any movie with Patton Oswalt getting way in over his head despite his good intentions, Johnny Knoxville getting set on fire, Patrice O’Neal dropping F-bombs in front of innocent children, and Rob Riggle waving around a gun even though nobody feels threatened by him is going to get some laughs. It’s R-rated Little Giants humor, and it’s inherently funny if that’s exactly the kind of humor you’re looking for, regardless of the context. The problem is, I think they all knew this and decided that after the initial setup everybody could just do their thing.
If you’re a fan of the comedic talent found in Nature Callsyou’ll probably enjoy it more than you’d care to admit. Just be warned: there’s not much storytelling here, just a bunch of funny people working their schtick with varying levels of success.
As of this writing, you can stream Nature Calls for free on Tubi.
