JOHN CANDY: I LIKE ME - Mark Reviews Movies

John Candy: I Like Me, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 9, 2025

Director Colin Hanks knows that anyone who wants to learn about John Candy's acting career can do so without his help. Candy's work is easy enough to find, since he was one of the more popular and liked actors from the mid-1980s until his death in 1994. John Candy: I Like Me assumes we'll be aware of its subject's career to some extent or that those who aren't so will want to be after learning about him in this documentary.

This isn't a portrait of Candy the actor, in other words. It is a testament to the man behind the scenes, whom everyone who met him loved and who genuinely seemed to want to get to know to anyone he met on some level.

Bill Murray offers the first interview here, and the usually stone-faced, speaking-in-deadpan actor can barely provide a few sentences about Candy before his face drops and his voice cracks. One imagines that one of the greatest compliments a comedian can get is making Murray laugh, so what does it say about Candy that his memory can so quickly and easily put Murray on the verge of tears?

Everyone you'd expect and more are on hand here to offer similar thoughts about the late actor, who is still fairly well-known a couple generations after his death. Mel Brooks, who directed him in Spaceballs, is surprised by that fact but pleasantly so. If Brooks' interview feels as if it is—like a few of the ones here—crammed into the documentary with little rhyme or reason, there's little reason to complain.

One gets the sense that Hanks approached as many people as possible and must have felt a bit overwhelmed by the response. Other people are more important and have more insightful things to say about Candy's career and personal life, but every testimony in this film keeps bringing us back to the same, seemingly undeniable point. Everyone wants to talk about this man, even after all this time has passed, and who is Hanks to deny them that opportunity, just because it might not fit into some streamlined narrative of a documentary?

The primary tone here is one of celebration, not only for how kind and thoughtful and genuine Candy was in all of his dealings, but also for how rich and complex and even haunted the man was. Yes, everyone liked him, and he, by all accounts, liked everyone, too. The first really significant thing we learn about Candy's biography, though, might explain a lot of that.

His father died when he was only 4 years old—and on Candy's birthday. According to relatives, no one in the family talked about it. Nobody grieved in any noticeable way. Candy just kept going with his life, trying to make his mother and, from there, anyone he met happy. He knew no other way of being, really.

Such are the insights of this film, which essentially follows a traditional biographical path but, at every turn, keeps its focus on what the events of Candy's life did or must have meant to and about the kind of human being he was. There's a lovely little detail, for example, that he desperately wanted to play football professionally when he was in high school, but a knee injury, which left him without a kneecap for his entire life, destroyed that dream. A few years before his death, Candy became a part owner of a Canadian football team, and there are archival photos and videos of him on the sidelines, looking about as happy as we ever see him over the course of this film.

A documentary that only cared about the acting, of course, might have missed that part of his life entirely, but Hanks constantly puts forth a sense that it is the little details that matter. It's true of life, so why shouldn't it also be true of a biographical account of a single life?

The filmmaker has basically assembled an entire documentary of those details. Most of them come from the interviews with colleagues, friends, and family members, including Candy's widow Rosemary Hobor and their two children, with his son Chris, who was young when the actor died, certainly feeling that connection to his father in knowing what it's like to lose a father at such a young age.

The colleagues and friends make up most of the testimony, though, and the interviewees here are basically a list of the who's-who of comedy from the era. There's Murray, of course, and there are Candy's fellow Canadians and TV co-stars Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Ackryod, Dave Thomas, and Eugene Levy. They knew him when he was just starting as an actor, watching with maybe, for some, a little professional envy as his star rose before their own but knowing to the core that he deserved it. Steve Martin and Tom Hanks are here, too, as is Macauley Culkin, who notes how Candy seemed like more of a caring paternal figure to him than the then-child actor's own father on the set.

All of them have stories, gratefully tell them, and paint a picture of this man who wanted to make everyone happy, because he knew what it was like not to be (Hanks is wisely selective in his use of Candy's acting work, especially when it comes to showing this vulnerable, insecure side turning up in his performances). John Candy: I Like Me shows that he did make people happy, on the screen and, more importantly, in life. What better legacy could anyone hope to have?

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