8/10 It’s strange to be reminded how niche “Always Sunny” still is.

Los Angeles- Legendary English actor Sir Tom Bingsley (Charlie Day, who also writes and directs), currently starring in a Billy the Kid biopic, won’t leave his trailer. The fed-up producer (Ray Liotta) drives past a homeless person, referred to in the script as the fool (also Charlie), who is a dead ringer for Bingsley, and uses him to complete production. Despite being apparently mute and described by doctors as “having the mind of a Labrador retriever” who knows how to do nothing but confusedly imitate the people around him, the fool is propelled to Hollywood stardom and eventually a mayoral run.

Fool’s Paradise is a longform play on the subjectivity of art. Going all the way back to basics and the “Hero with the Thousand Faces,” a lot of film protagonists are meant to be blank slates onto which viewers project themselves. The fool is the blankest slate of all, and almost everything that happens in the film is the result of projection from one of the other characters. At one point filming a greenscreen scene as the Mosquito Boy, he literally becomes a puppet suspended on wires in the air and moved around the set by grips.

Fool’s Paradise is at its best when the fool is engaged in the polite, Charlie Chaplin silent-era nonsense he’s clearly inspired by. To Charlie Day, the man who’s made a career as a bar janitor on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” this is clearly Hollywood at its most glamorous, and he’s spectacular at it. Sadly, there aren’t enough pratfalls in Fool’s Paradise for them to carry it as a genre, and the film seems more concerned with being Charlie’s treatise on Los Angeles – “Always Sunny” shoots primarily in Los Angeles, where its creators met as out-of-work actors – and how it runs.

In his natural state, the fool is a spirit who roams the streets of Los Angeles. When left to his own devices, he leaves his home or whatever situation he’s in and just walks around town, and many of Fool’s Paradise’s filler sequences are of Charlie walking across iconic Los Angeles vistas blissfully unaware of the history he’s invoking.

Fool’s Paradise puts Hollywood at the center of the U.S. political system, shifting to make fairly cogent points about how much fantasy, anxiety and sexuality, all of which are dictated en mass by the Los Angeles dream machine, dictates political expression. Combined with the fool’s silent journey into the heart this machine, the film has a clear thesis about the emptiness at the heart of American self-image and how Hollywood contributes to that, but that’s not exactly a unique observation.

I’ve been to plenty of completely empty screenings, but Fool’s Paradise was the first where a rat popped out of the front row for a few moments, as if to make sure I understood my own deserted screening as symbolic of the film’s general reception – it opened at just $464,259 and has made less than $1 million. Technically that’s in a five-week run, but it’d dropped down to 10 theaters by week three and spent weeks four and five in one solitary theater in the entire country. I’d love to know where that was.

“Always Sunny” may be the longest-running live-action comedy in history, but it’s still a very niche show, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Fool’s Paradise had a limited appeal and brand recognition. As much as I enjoyed it and as much as Charlie’s passion and clear ideas for the project shown through, it’s much lower energy than the show, and it’s easy to see why the scant few people who showed up didn’t like what they saw.

Maybe Fool’s Paradise isn’t for everyone, but it’s personal, and Charlie’s having fun. I enjoyed it.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.