Kingpin (1996)
- warm
- brisk
- inventive
- intimate
- funny
Warm, kinetic, measured comedy / sport, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →After bowler Roy Munson swindles the wrong crowd and is left with a hook for a hand, he settles into impoverished obscurity. That is, until he uncovers the next big thing: an Amish kid named Ishmael. So, the corrupt and the hopelessly naive hit the circuit intent on settling an old score with Big Ern.
Our read · Kingpin (1996) (1996) reads as a warm, kinetic, inventive comedy · sport entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
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The shape of Kingpin
What watching it is actually like.
“You want crude 90s Farrelly bowling underdog comedy with raunch, hooks and heart.”
Skip it tonight — You hate gross-out gags or disability humor played for laughs.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself