07/25/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Good Burger
'Good Burger' is greasy kid's stuff

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*1/2 (out of five)
Starring Kel Mitchell, Kenan Thompson, Sinbad, Abe Vigoda, Shar Jackson, Dan Schneider, Jan Schwieterman. A Paramount picture written by Schneider, Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert, directed by Brian Robbins. Rated PG, contains violence and sensuality. Running time: 95 minutes.

Good Burger is based on a popular sketch from the Nickelodeon cable channel's All That, an all-children sketch comedy series.

It stars a couple of cheerfully likable young actors, has broad slapstick antics geared to children and a plot that's threadbare.

It's the much over-used underdog storyline: In this case, two young men who work at a family owned burger stand attempt to save it from a scheme by the coldhearted owners of the new hamburger palace across the street, who want to put Good Burger out of business.

Fortunately, the dimwitted Ed (Kel Mitchell) has come up with a special sauce that keeps customers lining up at Good Burger. "It makes me glad I'm not dead," says Abe Vigoda as Otis, Good Burger's 77-year-old fry man who wears an oxygen mask.

In their attempts to fend off their across-the-street competitors, Ed and co-hort Dexter Reed (Kenan Thompson) also discover that the Mondo Burger gang is using an illegal chemical to make their hamburgers look extraordinarily plump. Mondo Burger is run with cool authority by a character named Kurt Bozwell (Jan Schwieterman), who acts like a young Nazi.

It's the goofy good guys versus the mean-spirited bad guys, and it doesn't take more than a kindergarten education to figure out who is going to come out on top in this contest.

Mitchell and Thompson will do anything for a laugh, including dressing up as middle-aged women to get inside Mondo Burger to uncover the evil secret of the fat hamburgers. There are sight gags galore, including a car shaped like a hamburger and a giant plaster hamburger that falls from the roof of a building and flattens a car.

Good Burger has a cockeyed sense of humor, too. "How does 10 bucks sound?" one character asks Ed. "I dunno," replies Ed, crumpling a $10 bill next to his ear. Jokes like this were pretty funny to the youngsters at a recent screening, who roared every time someone in Good Burger used the word "butt."

Mitchell, who looks surprisingly feminine in his braided hair that's styled to fall like Barbra Streisand's did in her Funny Girl period, and the chubby Thompson (who also star in their own Nickelodeon show, Kenan and Kel) are a pair of cheerful clowns who give the heavyhanded material whatever bounce it has.

Sinbad plays Dexter's teacher in an Afro wig and outlandishly silly clothes that are parodies of the bell-bottom look of 20 years ago. Basketball star Shaquille O'Neal makes a cameo appearance as a basketball star.