John Candy: I Like Me

John Candy: I Like Me is a 2025 documentary film directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds that covers the life, career, and death of Canadian actor John Candy. It includes interviews with family members such as Candy’s widow, Rosemary, and children, Jennifer and Chris, along with collaborators like Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Conan O’Brien, and Macaulay Culkin. Archival material features never-before-seen home videos and footage from Candy’s roles in SCTV sketches and films, including Stripes, Splash, Spaceballs, Uncle Buck, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The project traces Candy’s path from his Toronto upbringing and Second City beginnings through Hollywood projects until his heart attack death at age 43 in 1994 while filming Wagons East.

John Candy: I Like Me Review

Only those who grew up in the ’80s can truly understand what John Candy meant to pop culture. His cherubic face and natural on-camera earnestness were constants of the era, but it was the joy and humor he drew from quiet moments as much as the loud ones—maybe more—that made it feel like you knew the man, that he was your friend, even if he didn’t know it. Seeing Candy’s name on a movie poster meant time spent in fellowship with your parents, all of you weeping with laughter together. Maybe that was just me, but I doubt it.

                   

Too often, documentaries get derailed by their own filmmakers. Pre-insanity Candace Owens nearly did this in her Daily Wire docuseries Convicting a Murderer. In it, the now third-rail grifter and antisemite teetered on the edge of making the story about herself rather than her subject. Colin Hanks—actor, director, and son of Tom Hanks—takes the opposite approach. From the start, he seems to understand exactly what he has: immediate family and a circle of legendary talents who loved Candy so deeply that their memories still shake with laughter and glisten with tears three decades after his passing. In the best decision of his career, Hanks simply lets them talk, working his directorial magic quietly from behind the camera, where it belongs.

In I Like Me, Hanks is granted limitless access to Candy’s past, and he wastes none of it. From its opening moments—Bill Murray blending his trademark dryness with rare vulnerability as he admits he’s still moved by his friend’s death 31 years later—to its closing notes of poignancy, I Like Me plays like a symphony of emotional resonance. Hanks may not be a musician, but his love for music, evident in his earlier documentaries about the industry, carries through here. That passion shows in the rhythm and flow of the film. It’s seamless—jaunty until it softly bridges to sentimental, tender as it crescendos into a refrain of warmth and intimacy. Most important of all, it feels genuine.

Many documentaries about actors are filled with the pretentious ramblings of industry phonies, waxing poetic about a performer’s “generosity,” as though encouraging a scene partner is on par with delivering medical aid to a jungle tribe. Ironically, it’s Hanks’s own father who offers the shallowest commentary here. Ol’ Tommy Boy slips into actor autopilot, tossing out the usual platitudes—but even his polished emptiness can’t dull the impact of Candy’s sincerity and kindness. Whether he means to or not, the elder Hanks ends up underscoring just how genuine Candy truly was.

Simply put, Colin Hanks—who’s had only modest success in front of the camera—has created a masterpiece. John Candy: I Like Me should be the very next thing you watch. Absolutely Worth It.

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