Movie Review: Saget’s Farewell, “Daniel’s Gotta Die”

Bob Saget’s last movie was mercifully slow making its way to its widest possible audience. The beloved “Full House” dad and adorably potty-mouthed stand-up comic died in 2022, in Orlando.

As bad luck would further have it, his last movie was titled “Daniel’s Gotta Die.” And it sucks.

This Canadian farce stars a bunch of sometimes amusing also-rans trapped in a “Knives Out” that doesn’t work. It’s yet another descendents-plot-violence-against-each-other-when-a-rich-relative-dies tale (“Greedy” featuring Kirk Douglas was another among many), with “the family” gathered in a beachside mansion to meet and mete out their fates.

The familiar faces here are The World’s Oldest Punk Rocker, Iggy Pop, as the dying-then-dead patriarch, character comic Mary Lynn Rajskub of “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Safety Not Guaranteed” and TV’s “24,” Jason Jones, aka “Mr. Samantha Bee” of TV’s “The Detour” and Saget, as the rich guy’s aide and “fixer.”

The star, the “Daniel” who’s “Gotta Die,” is Joel David Moore, best known for a recurring character on TV’s “Bones” and a face in the mostly-animated “Avatar” action franchise. The cruel truth is he lacks the presence to carry a picture, and the dully-written character he plays offers him no lifeline.

Daniel is an aspiring chef who is the only member of his family who stayed close to the rich father (Pop) that raised him. The others — Mia (Rajskub), Victor (Jones) and Jessica (Carly Chaikin) — were sent off to boarding school and remained estranged from the old man, if not estranged from his money.

Dad doesn’t want a deathbed reconciliation. He argues with Daniel, tells him “You couldn’t last a weekend with” his brutal siblings, and then makes a reunion of the lot of them a condition of his will.

Drug addict Victor, high finance power player Mia and ditzy “influencer” Jessica and Daniel will fly from Toronto to what looks like a Florida mansion to bond and “for the first time in your lives,” “work.”

As we’ve seen Mia throwing her Wall Street success weight around, dumping her busy work on her put-upon assistant (Varu Saranga), we’ve got another clue of the quality of this project. She’s “worked hard” to get where she is. But that’s conveniently tossed aside by a sloppy script that has their father envisioning them fending off iguanas as they chop coconuts — “real work.”

No dice. Carter (Saranga) gets that task.

Victor is dumped out of a car trunk when he arrives at the airport. Yeah, he’s deep in debt. Mia barks orders, Jessica live-streams and Daniel cheer-leads.

The bitter assistant Lawrence (Saget) has access to the safe and all these envelopes to hand out to one and all if they “don’t bail” out of a weekend in which they deal with the fact that Daniel is slated to get all the money and only his “generosity” to his siblings will earn them their share.

Let the plotting — poison, machete attacks, etc. — begin.

The plot “twists” are obvious.

Almost nothing plays as funny, not Daniel’s “positivity,” not his Black nurse girlfriend’s (Chantel Riley) cracks about “crazy-ass white people,” not Iggy’s ironic screen presence or Saget’s droll scheming.

Jones manages a few slapstick chuckles as the most desperate of the lot, the one consigned to do the dirty work for others.

“Daniel’s Gotta Die” is instantly forgettable. So if you want to remember Saget more fondly than his “final film,” scroll through Amazon Prime a bit deeper and pull up the filthy, dark and hilarious documentary “The Aristocrats.” It’s about the dirtiest joke comics have been telling each other, going back decades, and the supposedly squeaky clean master of that drawn-out, revolting and ironic anecdote about the most depraved “family act” you ever heard of.

Nobody told “The Aristocrats” joke better than Bob, who deserved to go out in a better movie that “Daniel’s Gotta Die.”

Cast: Joel David Moore, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jason Jones, Carly Chaikin, Chantel Riley, Varu Saranga, Iggy Pop and Bob Saget

Credits: Directed by Jeremy LaLonde, scripted by Matthew Dressel. A Brainstorm Media film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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