Dude, Where's My Car?

Of all the illegal drugs, marijuana undoubtedly has inspired the funniest films, by far. Heroin films tend to be about the essentially alienating aspect of life, and cocaine films tend to be edgy yet predictable satires of some sort. But films such as "Friday" and last summer's "Saving Grace" have shown us that there is a comedy angel in the demon weed, delivering head-spinning laughs as well as some sort of non-overbearing moral. It's getting to where widespread marijuana use in a film augurs well for its quality.

However, some people still have a problem with chronic chronic use, for some reason. (It is probably necessary to note here that my evaluation of marijuana has thus far been from a purely cinematic standpoint; I cannot speak to either its medicinal or recreational virtues, due to personal inexperience.) "Dude, Where's My Car?" attempts to sidestep that disapproval while still getting its pot jokes by having the entirety of its action take place the morning after its main characters, Jesse (Ashton Kutcher) and Chester (Sean Patrick "Stifler" Scott) go on a mind-obliterating smoke-athon. Thus, apart from a brief scene wherein a dog gets silly, there are exactly no marijuana-smoking scenes (and, for that matter, no visible marijuana) in the actual film. So we get pot innuendo and a PG-13 rating! Fun, huh?

Well, no. The makers of both "Friday" and "Saving Grace" understood that the funniest thing about marijuana, cinematically, is when people are actually smoking it, and ratings be damned. Thus in "Friday" we had the bug-eyed antics of the inimitable Chris Tucker propelling the laughter through the film, and in "Saving Grace" we were treated to two septuagenarian shopkeepers falling all over themselves after mistaking the leaves for a new kind of tea. Scenes like these were the funniest parts of those films, and we have none of those here.

Instead, what we have is a bunch of clichés and random references and intermittent originality thrown together without regard for coherence or plausibility: a French ostrich raiser, a pathetic "Heaven's Gate"-like cult, a recalcitrant order box at a Chinese fast-food place, transvestite strippers, the triumphant return of Young MC's old-school classic "Bust A Move," high-school jocks trying to keep the hottie (Kristy Swanson, looking long in the tooth for this kind of role) in their clutches, and of course exceedingly odd people chasing after something called the "transdimensional confunctioner" or the "condimensional dysfunctioner" or the "transfunctional condimensioner" - I couldn't remember what this device, "whose mystery is only exceeded by its power," was called, and unless your short-term memory is particularly good you won't either.

Not that such a cassoulet of silliness is essentially bad, but it never becomes much of anything in terms of humor value. It's funny, but not unstoppably so. Part of this is due to the fact that Kutcher and Scott, while charming young lads, are not quite charming enough to make their characters' stupidity carry a film. Part of this is due to the fact that director Danny Leiner doesn't direct "Dude, Where's My Car?" so much as herd all of its jokes in the same general direction. Part of it is due to the fact that many these jokes are not quite stupid enough to be truly hilarious and not quite smart enough that we forget how stupid they are. And part of it is due to the fact that they left the star out of the film. "Dude, Where's My Car" was never going to be a "good" film, or even a spectacularly funny film, in any circumstances, but that's not what we're looking for when we see a film with the name "Dude, Where's My Car?" anyway. It might well have been more entertaining, however, if the producers had taken the R rating and let the film go all to pot.

Comedies Home

Movie Reviews Home

Spam-O-Matic Home