Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Review

While in high school I watched many episodes of the show Behind the Music on VH1. It was always fascinating learning about the early years of popular musical acts. The movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping plays out like a Behind the Music episode, but with a lot more laughs and a lot less heart.

Popstar follows the life of Conner Friel (Andy Samberg) and his two childhood friends Owen and Lawrence. The three of them formed a rap group called The Style Boyz that quickly rose to fame. Then like most groups, one of the members, in this case Conner, gets a big head and decides he is the reason for their success and starts a solo career. Most of the movie follows the events of Conner releasing his new album, Connquest, and his tour in support of the album, that ends up getting quite a different reception than Conner was expecting.

For the most part, Popstar plays out like an extended Saturday Night Live sketch. After a while the jokes get a little old and tiresome. For me, the reason I found the jokes to get old is because Conner is not a likable guy. He has a huge ego and is a jerk to everyone around him. The songs on his album Connquest are supposed to be terrible and because of that, I didn't enjoy having to listen to them during the movie. There was maybe one or two songs that I actually enjoyed in the movie.

The funniest parts of the movie were seeing the various cameos from famous singers. They would randomly pop up and give testimonials about how Conner and his old band, The Style Boyz, changed their lives and influenced them. One of my favorite cameos was from Justin Timberlake, he plays Conner's personal chef that enjoys singing but no one wants to listen to him sing. Justin is someone I wish got to do more acting. I also enjoyed the scenes where they mocked the news/gossip site TMZ. If you have ever watched a clip from TMZ, you will see that they were extremely accurate in mocking them with CMZ. Another highlight for me was when Conner was reading the review of his album on Pitchfork.com. I'm not sure everyone would get the joke, but Pitchfork is a website I go to often for music reviews. At times that site seems extremely snooty and pretentious, so seeing a singer react to a review was entertaining.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping has some very funny moments, but it also goes on way longer than it should. It's a movie that I would have preferred watching in short increments rather than one 90 minute sitting. If you are a fan of Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island, as well as Saturday Night Live, you will most likely love Popstar. For me it was just enjoyable, but not very memorable.