Young Einstein (1988)

I was very young when I first saw Young Einstein, an offbeat and whacky comedy starring Yahoo Serious, a man so serious about being Yahoo that he once tried to sue Yahoo. I had a blast with it. I knew that I would have a very different experience watching it as an adult, but I decided to dive in anyway.

Yeah, it wasn’t great.

Serious plays Albert Einstein, but this Albert Einstein grew up in Tasmania. He comes up with a very famous theory to do with energy, creates a potentially dangerous source of power while trying to put bubbles into beer, and invents rock and roll. He also endears himself to Marie Curie (Odile le Clezio).

The script, co-written by Serious and David Roach, isn’t actually THAT bad, in terms of being generally harmless fish-out-of-water fare that also enjoys rewriting some well-known history. Einstein is as naive as he is smart, and this provides a few chuckles during the first half of the movie, even when he is given a major problem in the form of Preston Preston (John Howard).

I would also tentatively recommend this as a way for younger viewers to find out very small snippets of science grounded within comedy moments. Is it a good primer for anything used here? No. But it is, for the most part, well-paced (aside from an awkward and strangely dark turn in the third act) and engaging enough.

There’s also an energetic soundtrack, with a couple of tracks “performed” by Serious, making his character a smart rock ‘n’ roller. 

Serious is the wrong person for the lead role. He tries to sell himself as much as the film, which is not a recipe for success, but at least both Howard and Le Clezio do better, the latter having to be shown to fall for our lead while the former gets to be a pantomime villain brought back into the plot for key scenes that provide obstacles for our hero to overcome.

There are a few fun running jokes, with apples being used often in a way that is integral to the plot, and some quirky details that manage to be more amusing than annoying, but the biggest problem that the film cannot really hope to overcome is, sadly, Serious himself. Good on him for trying to make this work, and not having it feel entirely like a vanity project, but a better star in the lead could have made this so much better. And you don’t need to be Einstein to figure that out.

4/10

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