Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Oh my goodness… this movie ‘The Truth about Average Guys’ was just so wrong on so many levels. So wrong. I mean… it’s just not right. Simply reading the synopsis of this movie could be deemed offensive to some but it was funny. Sometimes it was so funny that it brought tears my eyes. But is that something I’m proud of?

So Jason (Ken Gayton) works in an office with the beautiful Katie (Erika Walter) who doesn’t even know poor Jason exists despite his best efforts to get the woman to notice him. Jason also has a group of friends which includes his best friend and roommate Troy (Jason Schaver) who suggests to Jason all kinds of terrible and inappropriate advice to get Katie to at least have a conversation with him. Jason made the mistake of mentioning to these friends of his that he overheard a conversation where Katie had mentioned she had a mentally challenged sister. This prompted his friends to offer up Troy, a struggling actor studying for a role as a mentally challenged person, to be Jason’s mentally challenged friend which would give him a ‘in’. It’s an awful idea. Jason knows it’s an awful idea. In the history of bad ideas of getting over on a woman this might be the worst. And while Erika is cute and all I’m thinking we really don’t need to go these lengths to get her to go out on a date.

As circumstance would have it one fateful day Jason convinces himself to roll with this concept, against his better judgment, which eventually leads to Erika, her sister Stacy (Kimberly Hellum), Jason and his friend Troy who is faking mental retardation having a glorious day at the park. Now this woman who a week ago couldn’t even call this boy by his right name sees him for the man that he is. Kind of. There’s the whole lying retardation thing but I’m sure that’s gonna work itself out. Now Erika trusts Jason. She’s falling in love with Jason and Jason with her. Sure her friends don’t understand why she’s fallen for this average looking dude with no money but he’s honest and true. Or not, but it has gotten Jason some poo which is usually a good thing. Unless of course you’re faking mental retardation as a way to get this poo… then, you know, that’s not cool.

This is a Romantic Comedy so naturally everything eventually has to go all to hell, which of course it does… you know, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back… but while watching this movie I’m thinking that this is a RomCom concept for which there is no recovery from. Billy Dee Williams himself couldn’t logically smooth talk his way out of this one. I was curious to see how our filmmakers where going to write how this average guy got back into the good graces of this above average girl. Couldn’t wait to see that one.

As this movie ‘The Truth about average guys’ starts to grace your screen, a movie written and directed by the movies stars Ken Gayton and Jason Schaver, it clear rather quickly that this a feature that is low budget in origin. The lighting is flat, the images are a little blurry, the sound, while clear enough to allow us to hear everything our actors are saying, is a little inconsistent. These things are fairly typical for a shoestring budget movie. What’s not typical for a shoestring budget comedy, or any recent comedy for that matter this side of ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ is for the movie to be as funny or as entertaining as this one turned out to be.

Now recognize that the Mentally Disabled Community went completely ape-shit over ‘Tropic Thunder’ and the character of Kirk Lazarus’ ‘Full Retard’ soliloquy so its probably a good thing that ‘The Truth about Average Guys’ will more than likely fly under the radar and probably be seen by only a couple hundred people and their friends and families because Gayton and Schaver don’t have enough volume in their bodies to contain all the apologies they would need to appease these action groups. In fact, with all the ‘retard this…’ and ‘retard that…’ jokes in this movie, should these gentlemen hit it big, which could realistically happen based on this movie, they will be explaining off this flick for their entire careers.

But all of that aside ‘The Truth about Average Guys’ is a movie that works in some very clever and very witty writing within its admittedly offensive premise, it is also written in a way to accentuate the skills of the actors our team has cast in this movie. In addition to the humor and the clever writing the story that we are treated to is kind of sweet in its own offensive way and somewhat unique, which isn’t easy to do within the tight confines of the RomCom but the filmmakers manage to pull it of here and have created a movie that isn’t wholly predictable. And yeah, while the film does have a low budget gloss covering the production it doesn’t take long, maybe five minutes, until you forget about all of that and just revel in the ridiculousness of it all.

I watched the movie with my wife and fourteen year old boy, curious if it was age appropriate as a I slipped the disk in… it totally wasn’t… but by the time it got really crass it was far too late by then since the boy was laughing harder than I was. His mom went to sleep. Sorry. So if you want to laugh, view a different take on the tired RomCom genre and aren’t bothered by the repeatedly inappropriate use of the word ‘Retard’, then ‘The Truth about Average Guys’ is a movie well worth watching.