The late Canadian actor John Candy was very talented at performing in comedy. He was a tremendously nice guy and a decent father. He was also plagued with anxieties, stemming from both the way others treated his weight and from the death of his father on Candy’s fifth birthday.

Those are the insights of Colin Hanks’ new biographical documentary I Like Me. Everything else, to be honest, is just padding.

It is frustrating to watch, because certainly John Candy is a performer who is worth celebrating. His career kicked off performing improvisational comedy for North American institution Second City, and he started off among a once-in-a-generation collection of talent including Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, and Eugene Levy. From there he became a fixture of 1980s and early 1990s comedy films, co-starring in the likes of Stripes (1981), Splash (1984), Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), Uncle Buck (1989), and Cool Runnings (1993). He even turned his hand effectively to a dramatic role in JFK (1991), promising new directions had he lived past 1994.

I Like Me uses a lot of home movie footage to show his private life, and extensive clips from his films to show his professional side. In between there are a lot of ‘talking head’ interview subjects, including close friends and family  plus a lot of famous Hollywood talent. Films like this are relatively commonplace these days, and usually do a brief festival run before finding their permanent homes on streaming services. In the past few years I have reviewed a couple here, based on figures like John Clarke, Sylvester Stallone, and John Williams.

The thing about these celebrity biographies is that their lives have to be interesting, and people’s anecdotes about them have to be entertaining. In John Candy’s case, he was clearly very talented; I am just not sure how interesting he really was. From one interview subject to another, those three insights keep coming up: he was talented, he was a lovely person, and he had anxiety. There are only so many times a film can tell you the same three things before you are craving for an end.

I would write more, but I feel you probably get the idea. John Candy was talented. He was nice. He had some anxiety issues. Honestly your time is better spent watching one of his films.