The Beastie Boys Present: A Tale of Sound and Fury: Revisited: By an Idiot

Wood, Rogen, and McBride take a break from terrorizing the citizens of New York to ponder the meaning of it all – drunken frat bro style.

Close your eyes, America. Another long-washed-up band is attempting to be relevant again. The Beastie Boys just released a whopping “music video” onto Hulu. It is over thirty minutes long and may be the most amateurish video I’ve seen in years. Yes, it tops the music video for Rebecca Black’s so-called song “Friday.” That at least was merely a poor attempt at aping recent pop music videos.

The Beastie Boys’ behemoth of a music video, however, is just a sad attempt at relevance. Over its thirty minutes, a thousand stars appear (mostly comedians) and shockingly, none of them are funny. I recognized Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Seth Rogen, Rainn Wilson (or ‘Dwight’ from The Office), Chloe Sevigny, Will Ferrell, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Zach Galifianakis, Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and Orlando Bloom. If you watch the credits, you’ll notice many more.

I don’t know if words can describe the utter insanity that is this video. Wood, McBride, and Rogen pretend to be significantly fatter and older versions of the Beastie Boys and engage in random acts of carnage – all of which are depicted as childish, foolish and reckless. There’s no joy to their acts, just purely whimsical destruction. In one minute, Chloe Sevigny stabs Elijah Wood and then offers them acid while a very ugly “metal girl” rants about Bon Jovi. An ancient Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon go off on monologues about sledgehammers and pie (referencing a decades old Beastie Boys music video) while the three faux-Beastie Boys shuffle awkwardly. Will Ferrell makes a brief appearance as a cowbell playing hick limo driver. That all happens in the first fifteen minutes.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the video became even stranger. In one scene, Ferrell, Reilly, and Black step out of a time-travelling DeLorean while a tumbleweed blows by.  Apparently, Ferrell et al. are the “real Beastie Boys…the ones from the future where the sh-t is really real.” They then have a dance-off because…I really don’t know why. I also don’t know whose idea it was to have Black, Reilly and Ferrell spend four or five minutes (trust me it felt like an eternity), complaining about the knots tying up the dance mat. The video’s dialogue sounds like it was written by a very drunk David Lynch – who forgot how to speak English. I’m not exaggerating.

After several minutes of very clumsy dancing, they all began urinating on each other before being arrested. As they are taken away in the paddy wagon, the screen says: “TO BE CONTINUED – CHECK BACK IN 25 YEARS.”

I know that I (along with the rest of the world) will be waiting with bated breath.  

Nothing in this video works. Not a single moment is funny or interesting. It all feels like a post-“Love Game” Lady Gaga music video, in that they are just trying to be weird in order to be exciting. Unfortunately, off-the-charts weird does not equal skill, relevance, or even interesting. The Beastie Boys are grasping for straws.

If you want to judge for yourself, the video is embedded below. Warning: Lots of NSFW language.

–J.P. Harrington