Comedy films are supposed to make you laugh, of course, but they can also make you feel many other emotions. They can touch your heart, make you cheer, or - in the case of a well-done political satire - make you angry. As a rule, they aren't supposed to make you feel depressed, though. The characters in Hot Rod are so pathetic and deluded, by the 20-minute mark I was wondering if I should have opted for something a more uplifting film. Redacted, perhaps.

Hot Rod stars Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg as the title character, a would-be daredevil who still lives at home and tries to pull off death-defying stunts on his moped. Needless to say, the stunts don't go very well, as we see in excruciating detail early on. Meanwhile, his gruff stepfather constantly beats him up, and Rod secretly pines for his beautiful neighbour (Isla Fisher, who inexplicably chose this as her follow-up to Wedding Crashers). When the stepdad is on his deathbed, unable to afford an expensive heart transplant, Rod decides he will jump over 15 buses to earn the money and gain his respect.

That's the first twenty minutes or so, at which point I finally said "screw this" and watched NFL Replay instead. Yes, dear reader, I committed the film reviewer's ultimate sin: I didn't finish watching the movie I'm critiquing.

It's possible for a bad movie to improve as it goes along - for another motorbike-themed example, see Easy Rider, which became a different film when Jack Nicholson finally showed up. But the makers of Hot Rod had twenty minutes to hook me, and they couldn't do it. If the movie really does get a lot better, I apologize. But all I saw was a lame Napoleon Dynamite rip-off featuring self-consciously quirky, badly-dressed people in some of the ugliest locations ever committed to film.

I was surprised and disappointed how much I disliked Hot Rod (the first twenty minutes thereof, anyway) because some very talented people were involved. Writer Pam Brady has written several classic episodes of South Park, and director Akiva Schaffer was largely responsible for the celebrated "D**k in a Box" and "Lazy Sunday" digital shorts on SNL (a fact trumpeted on the DVD packaging). Maybe he should have stuck to films less than six minutes in length.

Look, I can only offer my opinion. You might be every bit as repulsed by some of the movies I find funny. (I have Hudson Hawk on DVD, for crying out loud.) Hot Rod seems to have found something of a cult following during its short run in theaters this past summer, and if you enjoyed it, more power to you. But leave me out of it.