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Tony Shalhoub is an interesting guy. He plays an overly-accented Italian taxi driver on "Wings" for years... he plays a Lebanese guy with no accent in "The Siege," and now, he's playing a honky that changed his name to Fred Kwan and made himself up to look Asian in order to get a part on the TV show that forms the basis of this film (a plot point that doesn't really get explained). But he's the best character in the film. Or... at least he has the best one-liners. William Shatner (Tim Allen), Leonard Nimoy (Alan Rickman), Nichelle Nichols (Sigourney Weaver), George Takei (Daryl Mitchell) and James Doohan (Shalhoub) are all making a living on the Dork Convention circuit, subsisting solely on their fame in geek circles from their roles on the hit show Star Trek (Galaxy Quest). Then real aliens show up, thinking they're real space cowboys, and make them fight their battles for them. Cue hijinks! At first, I thought it would be a pretty funny idea. Then, I thought it would be unbelievably lame. It turned out to be pretty much down the middle, with some really funny stuff but not quite enough to live up to the full potential. Still very much worth checking out. Try to ignore the really obvious substitution of 'harmless' words for 'cuss' words in a few instances. 'Fuck' is evil, 'screw' is good. 'Fuck' will fist your uncle and punt your dog over the fence, but 'screw' will babysit your kids and clean up the dog-shit in the backyard for you.
The only problem is that I think William Shatner is ten times more amusing than Tim Allen. William Shatner is completely insane, and I think the end of the film should have had a sequence where Shatner kicks the living shit out of Tim Allen for about ten minutes. And I don't even really have that big of a problem with Tim Allen. He's fine. I remember laughing at that grunting stuff back when he was only doing stand-up. But Shatner kicking his ass would be glorious.
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