Take one cup of "Half-Baked", two cups of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", throw in a pinch of "Men in Black", put it all in a shake-mixer and give it to your grandmother for an hour and a half. The result is "Dude, Where's My Car?", a hodgepodge of slapstick comedy, alco-humor, and gross-out jokes.
In case you managed to miss the trailers, commercials, and talk-show plugs, and are still a bit confused about the premise, "Dude, Where's My Car" follows the adventures of two best friends, Jessie (Ashton Kutcher) and Chester (Seann William Scott), who awaken one day with no clue as to what transpired in the night of partying before. To make matters worse, Jessie's car is missing. We later learn that any number of important artifacts disappeared with this vehicle, not the least of which were the anniversary presents for the two guys' girlfriends, Wilma and Wanda (Jennifer Garner and the gorgeous Marla Sokoloff). Encounter after goofball encounter brings us closer and closer to the recovery of this elusive set of wheels.
What could easily be a brilliantly simple premise is, unfortunately, dead on arrival, as "Dude, Where's My Car" falls into the common pit of overusing tired and cliché gags that are only funny in the previews. Adding insult to an injured funny bone, "Dude" tries to be too many things at once, and forgets itself altogether. From stupid slapstick gags to SNL-esque catch-phrase comedy, to what it THINKS is highbrow satire, the film presents a series of situations which steadily increase in weirdness, but not funniness.
The pure and unique idea of just following two simple-minded friends as they search for their lost car and try to learn what they did the night before is abandoned. In it's stead, we get a wildly overwrought and preposterous set of circumstances involving a case of stolen money, a UFO cult, a drug deal, extra-terrestrials, and a device that can destroy the universe. If only the movie were as funny as that sounds.
While there are brief moments of hilarity here, I found myself searching for something to laugh at. I'm far from a comedic genius, yet I was constantly aware of points in the film where a gag- even a small, pointless one, would have sped up a dragging scene and resuscitated the dying film. The timing of the jokes becomes so predictable, that by half-way thorough, most of the audience will know the ETA of the next gag. They can prepare themselves in advance for a laugh that, more often than not, will never arrive.
Much of the crowded theater I saw "Dude, Where's My Car?" in seemed to laugh at enough of the jokes to make their trip worthwhile. Perhaps I'm just too tough on comedies- I do expect a lot of them. But in the case of a film whose previews made me laugh as much as this one's did, I felt like I deserved a little more than what I got.
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