Copper Mountain

“Copper Mountain” is barely a movie. The run time clocks in at 60 minutes on the dot, and that includes extended credits sequences and entire, unedited song performances. It is astoundingly inept.

The only reason this film has as much notoriety as it does is due to Jim Carrey’s presence, long before he became an A-list comedic acting icon. Much like with Adam Sandler’s early movie “Going Overboard” (also in the Bottom 100), “Copper Mountain” still consistently gets marketed due to the presence of a future A-lister in the cast. That said, I appreciate “Going Overboard” slightly more, if only because it acknowledges its failings out of the gate. “Copper Mountain” is arguably a worse movie (or at least of comparable quality), but everything is played absolutely straight.

Jim Carrey’s role in the movie is basically a showcase of his ability to impersonate celebrities, making this a “Master of Disguise” years before Dana Carvey created that cinematic travesty. However, when he isn’t hamming up with his impressions, Carrey’s character is an absolute sad-sack, who spends most of his dialogue complaining that he can’t impress women with his frenetic antics. Interestingly enough, his arc concludes with him impressing women with a frenetic antic. Not a whole lot of progress is made.

Outside of Carrey, “Copper Mountain” also features Alan Thicke, who plays an incredibly pretentious aspiring skier. His arc ends with him losing both of his skiing races, which is theoretically progress according to this movie.

I mentioned that the movie relies heavily on live song performances. Amazingly, despite this fact, this movie has incredibly bad sound quality in all of the dialogue scenes. Background noise is constant, and most lines that are done indoors are nearly impossible to decipher.

Last but not least, I want to point out the original, official title to this movie: “Copper Mountain: A Club Med Experience”. Basically, this movie exists to promote a resort, making it essentially a tourism video at its core. And, to be honest, I think I have seen higher quality tourism videos.

There are only two reasons I might recommend this movie: 1) It is incredibly short, so you wouldn’t be wasting much of your time, and 2) The CCR covers that kill time in the middle of this flick aren’t too bad (I think Lodi actually gets played twice…). Overall, “Copper Mountain” just isn’t very fun, so I can’t in good conscience recommend it. If you want to see a low-budget, bizarre bad movie featuring an A-list comedian, go with “Going Overboard”.