Chris Farley Ended His Comedic Career With A Major Western Flop Featuring A Friends Star

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Chris Farley was only 33 years old when he died of an overdose on December 18, 1997, and it all felt horribly inevitable. He'd been in and out of rehab so many times that being an incorrigible addict had become part of his comedic persona. When he returned in the fall of 1997 to host "Saturday Night Live," the series that launched him as a comedic dynamo earlier in the decade, the entire cold open made a joke out of his ability to do the show. At the time, I couldn't believe what I was watching. He was clearly unhealthy and sounded like he'd been gargling razor blades, as though his body itself was trying to reject him.

If you know Farley's story, you're aware that the people in his orbit did everything they could to get him sober. Alas, he kept finding his way back to the party. His lifestyle was increasingly unkind to him, and it showed, heartbreakingly, from one movie to the next. Though "Tommy Boy" was terrific, the promise of a film series featuring Farley and David Spade as a duo was wrecked by the horrid "Black Sheep." "Beverly Hills Ninja" was a modest improvement, but Farley had never worked harder for a laugh before in his career. He dearly needed a change-of-pace rom-com like "The Wedding Singer," something that would give his sweet side as much play as his bull-in-a-china-shop explosiveness.

On paper, Farley's next film seemed like a step in the right direction. It was a historically savvy comedy that sought to emulate the sophisticated silliness of "Black Adder." He would be paired with Matthew Perry (then in the midst of his run on "Friends") and directed by a bona-fide comedic genius in Christopher Guest. For once, Farley might not have to lean heavily on his slapstick gifts to generate belly laughs. Then they made the movie.

The most shocking thing about "Almost Heroes," which was dumped in theaters on May 29, 1998, is that Guest didn't lobby to get his name removed from the project. At a runtime of what feels like a contractually mandated 90 minutes, this frontier comedy about two explorer rivals of Lewis & Clark bumbling their way across the continental United States lurches from one scene to the next with scant concern for narrative coherence. It's misshapen, tonally unbalanced, and rarely funny.

As Thomas R. Wolfe, one of the film's three credited screenwriters, told authors Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby in their book "The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts," the film's undoing was the studio's post-production meddling. While Guest and the writers envisioned an ensemble comedy that, à la "Black Adder," would deftly blend witty dialogue with broad laughs, the studio wanted to see Farley smashing through walls and punching bald eagles. Per Wolfe, "They cut the ensemble scenes first, Matthew Perry's second, and Chris's never."

Though most of "Almost Heroes" is a haphazard, depressingly unfunny Farley showcase (it's not his fault, the situations are just uninspired), there are stray highlights. Eugene Levy gets way too much mileage out of a hilariously awful French accent, while Perry, in a scene that finds him battling a sky-high fever, makes a delirious, heartfelt plea for bear suffrage. That's miles better than anything in "Black Sheep."

"Almost Heroes" was not an ideal sendoff for Farley, so it was nice to visit theaters two weeks later and see the big guy in a gloriously silly cameo as a surly barfly in the low art Norm Macdonald classic "Dirty Work." And now they're both gone.