Tony Dedman (Todd Sheene) is someone who lives to write. However, his writing keeps getting sidelined by his best friends Lou (Allen Martin) and The Bandit (Scott Stafford), who dream of getting a cable wrestling show. With a major local phenom in a wrestler called Captain Cannonball (Andrew Willett), Tony writes his scripts and believes that they will finally graduate from backyard wrestling to fully televised cable series.
However, when Cannonball hangs up his tights to become the mascot for a cereal company in another state, Tony and his friends find that all of their aspirations for fame and fortune go out the window. Tony is quick to blame his friends for dragging him down a worthless path of distractions, while his friends are quick to blame him for not being there for them.
As Tony starts a menial job as a newspaper delivery person, he is overcome with bitterness and rage by where his life has gone. This is made even worse when he has to consistently deliver newspapers to his old enemy, Randall Powers (Jason McKinnley), who has become wealthy due to his pyramid scheme involving male growth enhancement called SWELL!
When Tony finds that Randall intends to retire in a few months and become the first person from Danville, KY to live in Mexico, Tony decides that he will do whatever it takes to beat Randall there. Showing up his old rival is worth any sacrifice. In order to do it, he’ll have to team up with The Bandit and Lou to track down the Kentucky version of the sasquatch, the Bigsquatch! If they can stay out in the woods for a week with a potential serial killer named Bass Adkins (Ron Parritt) who has a past connection with the Bigsquatch, they’ll earn $3,000 from a researcher named Dr. Jezik (Alan Ross).
The plot of Cannonball is pretty straightforward, although the name is somewhat confusing since the character the film is named after spends only four or five minutes in the entire film. Nonetheless, the overall feel of the film works pretty decently. The main actors start a little shaky at first but do a pretty good job of getting you to buy into them by the mid-way point of the film. Director Scott Stafford plays a pretty large role as The Bandit, which he does a nice job with. (Interestingly, his facial acting and physical appearance bear a striking resemblance to Giovanni Ribisi.)
One of the funniest scenes in the film involved Tony explaining to Dr. Jezik that he’d been trained in mythological creatures. The flashback that accompanies it is of a community college lecture room in which a frazzled professor bumbles in and explains that, due to budgetary cutbacks, the algebra 101 class he teaches will now be combined with The Study of Mythological animals. As the professor tries to ask what the squareroot of X is when Y is represented by the number of eggs a unicorn lays, the rest of the class slowly sneaks out until only Tony is left. It was pretty great!
While the acting of the main characters was fairly solid and convincing, the acting of a lot of the supplemental characters is not as strong. Some of the contributing characters are pretty believable (like two rednecks who inhabit a service station out in Bigsquatch country), but many are very difficult to believe and, as such, pull you out of the story. Often times it’s hard to think of it this way, but the acting in a film is only as strong as your weakest actor. Even if a character has a very small part, they have to be believable or it takes away from the film.
