Originally filmed in 2003 (only to get shelved for the next five years), “The Onion Movie” may seem like a low-rent rip-off of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s recent barrage of spoof movies, but its from a completely different ilk. Sure, it follows the same formula of slapping together a bunch of random sketches that have nothing to do with one another, but “The Onion Movie” plays more like a bad episode of “SNL” than a game of pop culture Russian roulette. The basic idea of the film is that the Onion News Network has been assimilated into a media conglomerate, and as a result, disgruntled anchorman Norm Archer (Len Cariou) has been asked to compromise his journalistic integrity in favor of less newsworthy events. Though most of the sketches are clever on paper (and would no doubt garner a giggle or two if you saw it in an issue of The Onion), they never quite develop on screen. Steven Seagal’s cameo in a fake movie trailer for “Cock Puncher” would have been funny if it weren’t featured so prominently in the real trailer, while jabs at underage sex icons like Britney Spears and a commercial for a company that specializes in “penis retrieval” are mildly humorous. If there’s anything to learn from an experiment like “The Onion Movie,” it’s that just because a certain style of comedy works in one medium doesn’t mean it will work in another.
