I Hope the Theme Park Is Better than the Movie

Maybe Nate Bargatze is a huge arena act, maybe he was decent a couple of times on SNL, and maybe he’s a terrifically nice guy, but the man is the absolute pits at co-writing and starring in his first feature film. It’s not just bad for theatrical. It would’ve been a terrible streaming film, too. It is infinitely worse than Old Dads, which at least had jokes (bad ones, mind you, but they existed) and even worse than Netflix’s last attempt to mine Dad comedy from a stand-up, Bert Kreischer’s Free Bert.

I would love nothing more than to see comedy make a theatrical resurgence the way that horror has in recent years, but while horror takes big swings with original ideas, comedy is apparently still stuck in the ’90s. The entire premise of The Breadwinner is this: Bargatze plays Nate Wilcox, a successful Toyota salesman. His wife, Katie (Mandy Moore), is the put-together, well-organized stay-at-home mom. Katie invents a lame reminder contraption that uses the branches of a star to, like, remind the kids to brush their hair, gets $100,000 from Shark Tank, and Nate has to take a few weeks off from his job to take care of their three daughters. Chaos ensues.

It’s funny, see, because Dads are terrible parents? Because Nate doesn’t know how to make eggs, or open a cabinet without spaghetti avalanching out of it, or soak a pot used to cook instant oatmeal. He can’t even take his kids to school because he doesn’t know where the schools are or even what they’re called. See? It’s funny because he’s a shitty father! And he doesn’t understand how to wash towels.

I swear to God, there’s a pivotal plot moment in the film where Nate’s entire solution to parenting is … Walmart. He can have his cake (parent his children) and eat it, too (work at the car dealership) by simply shopping at Walmart. Instead of giving his kids a healthy breakfast, he can buy cereal! Instead of doing the laundry, he can just buy his kids a few weeks’ worth of outfits. There’s a good five-minute product placement for the entire store. They probably got more from Walmart for that placement than the film made in its opening weekend.

There is, I concede, exactly one good joke: After Katie wins $100,000 from Shark Tank — and I should note that the Shark Tank judges have cameos in the film — Nate agrees to parent the kids for a few weeks. Katie asks, “Are you sure? Do you even know what the parent portal is?” And Nate responds, “Is that a wizard thing? Portals don’t exist in reality.”

Yes, it’s a bad Dad joke. Yes, I laughed. It was the only time, though I did teeter on the edge of amusement when Nate berated his middle daughter for taking a spelling bee too seriously, insisting that spelling bees are “dumb” and that you don’t need to know how to spell to become a successful adult. I don’t agree with the sentiment, but Nate’s absolute contempt for the spelling bee almost veers into comedic territory.

Otherwise, despite appearances from SNLers Will Forte, Martin Herlihy, and Colin Jost — the last of whom shows up in a spectacularly pathetic role — there’s nothing in The Breadwinner that even elevates it to the level of acceptable time-wasting on Netflix on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It’s not just bad; it’s painfully dated, even for the midwestern audience it’s presumably courting. It’s trash. And I certainly hope that if Bargatze is planning to move ahead with his theme park, he puts considerably more thought into it than he did into the script for The Breadwinner.