Pros: Two good jokes, and the main leads are at least eye-catching.
Cons: The most inept, laudable, downright poor film released over the past 10 years.
The Bottom Line: With humour so flat, and characters so basic, this is one-dimensional in every sense. For the love of all things sacred, do not see. Seriously.
Simply_Crispy's Full Review: Dude, Where's My Car?
Brian DePalma, ye may rest easy. For the past 12 months, you’ve held the burden of having produced the most inept, awful and potentially career ending film of this Millennium after you allowed the world to see “Mission To Mars”. Now you can show your face in the light of day once more, for the newly crowned pairing of Danny Leiner (creator of the much acclaimed TV series “Felicity”) and scripter Philip Stark (of the anything-but-critically-acclaimed TV series “That '70s Show”) have created a film that is, whatever your taste in films, simply unwatchable.
When perpetually addled poor-man’s-Bill-And-Ted, pizza delivery boys Jesse (Ashton Kutcher) and Chester (Seann William Scott) wake up after a party, they can't remember whether they had a good time or not, and their car's missing (see? Now, how’s THAT for a clever film title?). As they search for the truth, they discover that their girlfriends hate them (as, soon, will we), that they're valued members of a local lap-dancing club (cutting edge stuff here) and that a transsexual stripper wants his/her case of money (it gets worse). All that, and several groups of aliens think they've nicked the most powerful device in the universe (told you).
It must have seemed a good idea for the fat cats at 20th Century Fox: Pair a helmer of screwy TV shows with a writer of US sitcoms and, given a long enough timeline, you'll eventually locate a previously untapped reservoir of talent that gives the film industry a much needed shot in the arm of new ideas and boundless energy. Well, you know what they say, put a monkey in front of a typewriter for long enough and it’ll rattle out Shakespeare. Mostly though, you'll end up with stuffy D-list rubbish like “Dude, Where's My Car?”
If this didn’t prove to you, as if proof were needed, that the return of the dumb teen comedy genre may now be scraping the bottom of the barrel, Leiner’s woefully inept buddy flick redefines the term ‘unfunny’, sinking to levels you’d never once thought possible. The first fundamental mistake is thus: repetition of dialogue for a means of raising laughs is simply a no goer; to have our protagonists repeat the same phrases time after time after time is… well, it’s like watching a real-life version of the Teletubbies, although it’s debatable whether or not the core audience of even this show would find this stuff funny. Furthermore, jokes about oral sex, sex, or even the mention of sex are only funny if subtle. If they are blatantly spelled out for you, then where’s the fun in that? And so it goes on, without ever throwing in an original idea in its 82-minute running time.
Quirky title aside, “Dude, Where's My Car?” is an alleged ‘stoner comedy’. Alleged in the sense that there isn't a single belly laugh in the whole movie (or indeed, even a slight snigger), and that although characters keep saying that they're stoners, the two leads are remarkably drug-free for the duration. Which pretty much sums up the courage of the film-makers' convictions.
And then there’s the curious ‘visual jokes’, mainly involving the characters . It’s a hard thing to assess, being that you’re not sure whether the actors in the roles were deliberately cast the way they were, or if – like everything else – the casting director was simply too lethargic to care. For example , the so-called ‘hot chicks’ s are more girl-next-door than downright sexy (nearer to Neve Campbell than Cindy Crawford), the teenage meathead and his prom queen girlfriend are played by actors who are quite clearly in their mid-30s and, in an apparent in-joke, the twin girlfriends don't even slightly resemble one another. Now that's comedy Or is it? Furthermore, a plethora of creaky old 'classics' - Brent Spiner as a Frenchman in a, wait for it, beret, some Swedish homosexuals, a fat cop etc - are all wheeled out for no apparent reason, and when true novelties do appear, they're thrown away without so much as a giggle. To wit, whatever premise the film throws at you, if you assume it’ll end up funny, be can be safe in the knowledge that it isn’t in “Dude, Where's My Car?” That the lads acquire a gizmo that makes girls “hoo haas” (the film’s raison d’ etre ) bigger is a perfect barometer for the level of humour involved.
It depressing to see Scott in such a demeaning role. Given his performances in “American Pie” and “Road Trip”, he has clearly illustrated that he is more than capable of delivering a punchline, while Kutcher has an amiable goofy quality about him. Indeed, given better material, it is not unthinkable that the duo could work as a comedic twosome. Sadly though, the phrase “you can’t polish a turd” has never been more appropriate, for as hard as the two leads try, they just simply can’t gloss over that fact that this particular feature is a shambling, dire, dull, criminally unfunny and derivate mess. And to make matters worse, one of the two funny gags in the movie, the boys’ discovery that they both have tattoos - “Dude! What’s mine say?” “Sweet! What’s mine say?”- appears in the trailer.
Recommended:
No
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age
Two fun-loving slackers, Chester and Jesse, wake up after a night of partying with a burning question: "Dude, Where's My Car?" As they retrace their s...More at HotMovieSale.com
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