The story starts with Frost’s character as a salsa-obsessed (the dance style, not the condiment) little kid named Bruce who has such a knack for shaking his ass and wearing flamboyant shirts that he and his sister-partner cut a swath of dance competition wins all the way to the national championships. A change happens the night of the big final dance when he’s jumped by a gang of meathead kids and handed a pretty serious beating for looking like a dandy though. From that point on, Bruce decides that “salsa is for pussies,” and eventually his non-dancing ways lead to him growing up to become a boring, frumpy office worker who happens to look a lot like Nick Frost. Thankfully for us, this is the beginning of the movie and not the end. Another change happens when a comely new co-worker named Julia (Rashida Jones) shows up at Bruce’s office and turns out to be a big time salsa enthusiast herself. Can our hero conquer his dance-fear and woo the object of his affection?
Probably—this is a comedy after all—but a few welcome complications get thrown into the mix that keep things interesting. The first is that Bruce’s co-worker and constant antagonist, Drew (Chris O’Dowd), has decided that he has a thing for Julia too, almost as much as he has a thing for denying Bruce of joy. The second is that Bruce’s old dance instructor (Ian McShane) is still bitter that he bailed on the competition the day of his beating, and is reluctant to help him tune up his skills. Probably the biggest problem though is that Bruce just might not have it anymore. After his formative shaming experience he buried all of his passions deep down inside of him, and it takes quite a bit of goading for that monster to bubble up to the surface and allow him to dance in the sort of transcendent way that might impress a lady as pretty as Jones. Basically, this is an Incredible Hulk story, but with salsa instead of smashing, so chances are you actually would like him when he’s angry. The character’s name is even Bruce.
The good news about Cuban Fury is that it’s funny enough, consistently enough that you never lose interest in it. Frost, Jones, O’Dowd, and McShane would all be unbelievably charming, even if they were doing nothing, and thankfully nothing isn’t what they’re doing here. That foursome gets the bulk of the film’s focus, and the script (written by Jon Brown, with Frost getting an original idea credit) is witty enough to keep them in clever quips from beginning to end. There’s a weird amount of broad physical humor (like, pratfalls, and fat guys using wire-fu to appear unbelievably athletic) that gets peppered throughout, and that stuff doesn’t work well at all, but it’s kept enough to a minimum and all of the verbal interactions are good enough to where you could still call this a solidly funny film.
O’Dowd, especially, is great as the jerk antagonist who’s smugly trying to steal the girl out from under the schlub. He’s such a prick here. He reaches Vince Vaughn in Made levels of being an annoyance to the audience, and it’s pretty great to watch. An actor named Keyvan Novak is also really funny as the flamboyant and excitable new friend that Bruce meets at his dance classes, Bejan. You think the character is going to be one-note, but then he hits you with a bunch of complex metaphors that involve him monologuing deep references to Back to the Future and The Goonies, and before you know it the guy has you howling at everything he says.
What’s unfortunate is that Jones doesn’t get nearly as great of an opportunity to be funny as the guys. She proved in Celeste and Jesse Forever that she can be a real asset in these sorts of romantic comedies, but unfortunately this film doesn’t give her anything to do other than be a prize to be won. Of course, she’s so sweet and glowing that she makes for a great prize, but her involvement played like a disappointment nonetheless. Cuban Fury takes some pains in the third act to become more of a movie about being true to yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone in order to live a fully engaged life, rather than just being a movie about the dork trying to win the pretty girl, but ultimately those efforts don’t quite add up to what they should. And that’s because the movie does spend so much time and put so much focus on getting the girl, and it does so while giving the actual girl so little agency of her own that it can sometimes come off as an anachronism. At one point in the film Frost and O’Dowd have a dance-off to decide who has the rights to pursue her, and she’s not even aware of the event or present for it. If the kind-hearted-character-experiences-unrequited-love trope wasn’t so inherently relatable and engaging, then the way this film is plotted could have made for a serious misfire.
The most important question that Cuban Fury was going to answer for us is whether or not that potential to be something more that Frost showed in The World’s End means that he really can be a leading man though, and as far as that goes I’d have to say that the answer is a resounding yes. The material he’s working with here is decent but not great, and it’s probably unlikely that this is the project that’s going to catch fire enough at the box office to make his career, but it should be enough to convince other filmmakers out there to give him a chance at being the lead. There’s something at his core that’s just so lovable, nobody is going to argue that he’s not hilarious, and he’s now shown that he’s got the chops necessary to handle the dramatic aspects of playing the character who goes through real growth and change. Someday he’s going to get paired with the right script and he’s going to successfully anchor a great film. But, you know, until that day comes, it wouldn’t be so bad to watch him play the slacker sidekick a few more times either. This guy is what sports fans would call a utility player. Maybe. I don’t know anything about sports.
