Late Night Is A Solid Comedy With an Outstanding Emma Thompson Performance

One of my all-time favorite books is The War for Late Night by Bill Carter, a 2010 book chronicling the events leading up to, during and after the whole early 2010 fiasco involving Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and The Tonight Show. Lots of great anecdotes about the various American late night shows hosts in that tome including extensive descriptions about what it's like to work for David Letterman. One such description had unnamed employees of his note that Letterman was a distant comic driven by anger and frustration in his work, but whenever he began to verbally beat himself up in front of his staff, they would immediately wish he'd redirect that anger unto them rather than continue to drag himself.

CHiPS Will Drive You Up The Wall With Its Abysmally Unfunny Attempts At Comedy

Look, when I said I wanted Michael Pena to headline more movies, I didn't mean....like this.

There's a lot of things that one could describe as odd about CHiPS on a basic conceptual level beyond the fact that human beings funded a major feature film adaptation of the 1970's TV show CHiPS in 2017. Most notably, the screenplay for CHiPS, which has its script credited solely to Dax Shepard, who also directs and headlines the film, seems to be channeling classic action/comedy cop movies (the kind Shane Black popularized) with extended action sequences, most notably one introducing us to the films antagonists played by Vincent D'onofrio, that are played entirely straight-faced. It then moves into the kind of raunchy foul-mouthed humor you'd expect from a D-grade R-rated American comedy in 2017.