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Review #77 of 365
Film: Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector [PG-13] 89 minutes
WIP: $3.00
When 1st Seen: 28 March 2006
Where Viewed: Regal Henrietta Cinema 18, Rochester, NY
Time: 5:10 p.m.
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DVD | soundtrack |
“Git-R-Done,” is Larry the Cable Guy’s catch phrase, and it has new meaning when put into the context of this foray into the world of a major motion picture—substitute the synonym of ‘over’ for ‘done’ and you capture the feelings of repulsion and revulsion that began to form in my stomach no less than 10 minutes in. Permit me a moment of digression here…first, I have only ever walked out of two movies in my entire life…this would have been the third had I been able to follow my gut instinct and not needed a film to review for today…second…I don’t like to go to a movie and come out with a completely negative review…I usually try to find the good in it, the devotion to the craft that got sidetracked by big studio demands or an independent film that just didn’t have the budget to go back and fix things that didn’t work…neither of those would apply to this film…still…I look at all angles and root around into, if nothing else, the sound track?...well…there’s nothing here…but, please, understand that movies have been my entertainment passion since I was nine years old, and nothing pains me more than to see one that is this terrible…and I was raised that if you cannot say anything nice don’t say anything at all, which would be preferable except that I owe it to the readers of this blog to help guide them…after all, I believe the purpose of these reviews is to back up the W.I.P. scale and this one is going to get a $3 rating (which as you may recall, is the lowest possible rating)...and it pains me to give it…but this film provides few options. Ok, with that in mind, here goes.
Never having seen the sketch comedy of Larry (Daniel Lawrence Whitney) the Cable Guy and his Blue Collar Comedy team before, and always having been a person who finds comedy that is rooted in either making fun of the stereotypes built around groups of people or reinforcing such stereotypes both harmful and not funny, I must start by saying that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and I didn’t like this film. I don’t find this type of comedy entertaining in the least. Because I am incapable of ascertaining if it is supposed to be funny because it is a satire about people who act and behave in real life like the character-become-persona of Larry the Cable Guy or if the racist, sexist, and other prejudicial things he says and seems to believe are supposed to be comical, my brain just takes this stuff in and dumps it immediately into a central processor. That processor then makes a decision: is this dilemma worthy of solving, will enlightenment come from figuring it out much like trying to understand some of the stuff in What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole, for example, otherwise the stuff is put in an internal shredder and discarded forever. This is a healthy defense mechanism for a modern brain that is exposed to sufficient material as would fill Waste Management® trucks in a stack from Rochester, NY to Manhattan daily. So, I’m having to write this review from copious notes taken during the movie since the entire mental videography of the film has been inconveniently shredded, erased, obliterated from memory. Inconvenient only in that it would be nice to have self-determination over when the shredding occurs, and if it could wait until after the review is written. Having established that I don’t care for this type of comedy in the first place, that does not mean that it might not still have been good for those who do like this type of comedy. I am assuming there must be some people that do, or else there would be no income for the Blue Collar Comedy group, and it would have to fold—unless the comedians felt the genre was too important to be lost to the law of supply and demand and self-funded the effort. I suspect there may be others who haven’t endured this type of comedy, however, and may take the risk with their $8-10 bucks to find out. Please, follow the W.I.P. scale and pay no more than $3 to see this film. I was reminded on the one hand of Jeff Foxworthy’s material with the key difference being that Larry the Cable Guy’s script for this Health Inspector film appealed far less to the upstanding parts of the brain and more to the cerebellum (where basal urges lie). So, picture the ‘red neck’ humor but with the addition of constant flatulence, projectile vomiting, voluminous Moon Pie® consumption, and unsanitary food and poor human hygiene humor tossed in. I did not get it. I did not enjoy it. I just wanted it to “git done” so I could “git out”. The script seems to have been written with a check list in mind so that there is literally no group of people the remains unscathed when it comes to attack. I once worked with a guy who said he wasn’t prejudice because he made fun of all groups, including his own, equally. Yeah, he used to say that with a wink and a chuckle. Well, I loathe that notion, and I loathed that this script seems to maintain that because it makes fun of uneducated, non-politically correct, white people, it is ok to take on every other group at will. Have Larry the Cable Guy make some crack about his own Hillbilly ancestry and then it is ok to insult or make fun of people in wheel chairs, utilize racial stereotypes of immigrant Americans, treat women as sex objects without brains, or just about anything else you can think of. Well, sorry, I don’t buy it. To me, this is cheap and easy comedy based on ignorance rather than brilliance.
I recall feeling sad quite often during the movie. Actually, Larry the Cable Guy is a pretty good actor—at least, I am assuming he is not just playing himself. I would like to see him play a real person as opposed to this persona and see if my instincts as to his talent are right. With minor exceptions, the rest of the cast is there just as window dressing for scenes for Larry’s comedy. For them, I mostly felt embarrassed. They do their best. I felt most sorry for Joanna Cassidy who plays a restaurant owner because I believe she is a talented actress and worthy of a much, much better film and Iris Bahr who plays the unfortunately named Amy Butlin and partner to Larry the Cable Guy Health Inspector because Ms Bahr seems to be as uncomfortable with her role in the film as her character is when she is assigned to be Larry’s Health Inspector partner. I believe there was talent at play in the creation of this film. I just wish the director, Trent Cooper, would have locked Larry the Cable Guy and writing partners Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer in a room, thrown out the original script, and said, “Let’s write a script and make a movie that will be worthy of people’s time and money and our talent.”
Well, I was chatting with a pal of mine yesterday who said he was looking forward to seeing this film because the preview made it look so funny. All I can say is must be a case of when every ‘funny’ scene in the film appears in the preview because the film, in general, was most certainly not funny.
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Larry The Cable Guy: Git-R-Done [VHS](2003) VHS
Larry The Cable Guy: Git-R-Done (UMD For PlayStation Portable)(2003)
Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector [DVD](2006) DVD
Larry The Cable Guy: Git-R-Done [DVD](2003) DVD
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| Git R Done | T-Shirt | Baseball Caps |
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