Bigger (2018) Reviews

• A nice propaganda piece for the Weider Empire

  denny3212018-10-20

  As a biography, Bigger hearkens back to the days when Hollywood biopics cranked out knights in shining armor using whatever mixture of fact and fiction they thought would fill the seats and send everybody home happy. Joe Weider is a presented as a blemish-free altruist who only wants to help the world become a fitter place; various inconvenient aspects of Joe's private and professional lives - including the timing of his two marriages and the existence of his daughter, legal difficulties stemming from highly exaggerated claims of his products' effectiveness, questionable treatment of business partners, and strong presence in the gay-oriented "beefcake magazine" market of the 1950s and early 60s with titles like Adonis and Body Beautiful - are either glossed over or ignored completely. Meanwhile, the villainous foil "Bill Hauk", officially claimed to be a composite of several real-life characters but pretty clearly a representation of U.S. Olympic weightlifting coach and rival muscle mag publisher Bob Hoffman, is a cartoonishly evil, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, violent thug. Exec produced by nephew Eric Weider, the film plays like the Weider Empire's bid for Joe's sainthood. Historical inaccuracies and omissions aside, as a movie it just isn't very satisfying. The years flip by so quickly it's difficult to build up much momentum, and we're often left wondering exactly how last year's big dilemma played out. Tyler Hoechlin as Joe does a capable job mimicking Weider's distinctive Polish/Yiddish/Quebecois accent but tacks on an awkwardly stilted manner of speech; oddly, both of these are absent in the always-classy Robert Forster's portrayal of Joe as an old man. The labored delivery combined with Joe's single-minded obsession with fitness makes him appear to be a sort of Rain Man of bodybuilding, and only succeeds in distancing the audience from the character. Repeated anti-Semitic attacks and accusations of homosexuality fail to build the viewer's sympathy after the first few instances, with a mounting array of epithets not heard for a while in a non-Tarentino movie. The film tries hard to present Joe Weider's life story as a classic David-versus-Goliath struggle. But given the ending we already know, it's pretty clear that this David's goal all along was to become an even bigger Goliath.

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• Inaccuracies & Poor Acting

  clintemshoff2018-10-21

  As a bodybuilding historian I was angered by the many historical inaccuracies in this movie. Seeing that present day Weiders were involved with it made this make more sense as the Weiders always inflated claims about their products. The acting was bad overall but seemed to get better through the movie. Hough was a bright spot as well as Moger's Arnold accent which was much better than I thought it would be.

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• A straight okay film.

  kjjames812019-02-15

  Now I know about the sport of bodybuilding as I have trained in gyms in and off since the eighties and used to buy the Weider magazines. So I was looking forward to this film to see old time bodybuilders. The film had a few in there but nothing as I thought there would be. So the film itself was good but nothing special, I felt it played it safe, nothing controversial in it. I was waiting for a strong punchline, something that would say it was in the Raging Bull side of movies not Driving Miss Daisy side of films, it sided with the latter. So I enjoyed but left disappointed with it. Overall a good film but nothing special with it.

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• BB Fan I wanted this to be amazing.

  aka_riley2019-01-18

  Huge bb fan and in the industry so I was excited for this movie. Just felt like there was no crescendo. Interesting story however accurate it actually is. Would have been fun to see more of the Arnold/frank/Sergio competition. It was just a blip in the movie. I know it's about Weider but still that time was defined by the Oak.

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• Well, I always wonder when Bodybuilding.com would have their own answer to UNITED PASSIONS.

  CinePendejo2019-01-18

  Before I get started, I want to address that I LOVE bodybuilding. I enjoy watching movies as well, hence my frequent visits in this site, but I first nurtured a strong passion for muscle building, clean dieting, and physical achievement. Currently embarking toward my Bachelors Degree in Athletic Training, I hold a high standard of how we treat our bodies as well as the unbelievable feats of strength of that involved. Sure we may be egocentric and a little too masculine, there's a lot of virtues about ideals tucked away within bodybuilding that would benefit all of life. But even then, even I wasn't shocked by how godawful BIGGER turned out to be. A cheap and manipulating Lifetime special, it's a movie that way too often glorifies the life of one Joe Weider (The father of Bodybuilding) while unironically presenting the self-centered, borderline toxic elements of said life with an earnest smile. It's not even appropriate to call this a mandate by committee; if you tell me a whole bunch of meatheads from IFBB came together and made a film school project, this would've fit the bill. For those who don't know, Joe Weider is what many would consider the Father of Bodybuilding, commencing his rise to fame by pioneering the Muscle&Fitness magazine and the Mr. Olympia competition. Growing up Jewish and poor during the dreadful years before World War 2, he envisioned that all people of different stripes have a right to achieve physical achievement the likes of the elite strongman of which he aspires from. And from there is literally rinse and repeat; he gets bullied along with his brother Ben Weider, they discovered something revolutionary, a string of violins cue in at the inspirational moments, Joe meets a girl, they get a divorce due to complications with his work, he meets an archnemesis - a cartoonishly evil rival magazine publisher played by one of the bad guys from LOST - and he soon reaches entrepreneur status. There's facts about Muscle&Fitness, fit chick models, where he got the name Mr. Olympia, and the famous encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes they're all important things that happened, but the film does absolutely nothing exceptional about it. Right down to a lazy framing device and the annoying Polish inflections by the otherwise capable Tyler Hoechlin, there's too many bad or uninspired filmmaking choices here to keep you invested. Even the admittedly timely philosophy within Weiders mission - about equality and female empowerment - just gets simplified by having the movie frame an opposing magazine publisher as a literal Nazi cartoon villain for the mighty Weider to defeat. I've seen Kevin Durand play one-note baddies before, but this somehow became a new low for the once-promising TV actor. What's even more depressing yet totally expected is the refusal to delve deep into Weiders darker side. There's a hint within Victoria Justice's throwaway wife role that suggests that Weider might actually be a psychotic, workaholic weirdo who obsesses about how people look without considering the "normal" ways of living. As a man who personally had complications like this before, It would've looked intriguing to see this manifest properly but no. The movie is too much on his side to even think about challenging him, so it frames anybody with any questions about bodybuilding as equal to the Nazis and the bullies who dare take away his glory. It's just vaguely toxic and just misguided to watch onscreen. But not about as misguided as the shockingly dumb decision to cast Callum Von Moger as Golden Age Schwarzenegger. The dude looks nothing like him no matter what fitness gurus tell me, and the audacity to see this lunk share clunky dialogue with dangly weirdo Weider makes me cringe. It's the type of obvious casting stunt that summarizes this uninspired, obviously calculated agenda of which this movie metastasizes from. Unless if you're biased about bodybuilding itself and thus don't have such a low tolerance for bargain-basement pablum, I would say that this man deserved a better movie.

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