Loading ...Movie Review - The Dukes of Hazzard
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2005 / 106 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
It’s amazing. I didn’t think this movie could possibly have less plot or character development than the show on which it was based.
I stand corrected.
I am an ardent fan of the original series and have been for about as long as I can remember. It’s not a great show, but it’s one of the first things I can ever remember being a fan of. When I was five (and even younger) my Friday nights used to consist of me sitting enthralled in front of the television, watching the “Dukes of Hazzard”. I was little, so I didn’t realize how cheesy it was. Though, even then, I realized that every episode of the show was pretty much identical. The Dukes, on probation for prior moonshine trafficking, are usually framed for some crime they didn’t commit by Boss Hogg and Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (the alleged authority figures in Hazzard, who are defined by their greed and lack of intelligence) who have always wanted the Dukes out of the way because the Dukes are two of the few people in the county that aren’t completely morally corrupt. The crime was almost always committed by people from out of town and was always solved at the end of the episode, usually as the result of a car chase. There, now you know the plot to every episode of this series. I purchased the first season DVD set of the series, purely out of nostalgia. And, oddly enough, even though the plot to every episode is the same, the show’s endearing characters, down-home charm and ample car chases still manage to entertain after all these years. There is a timeless quality to the cheesy fun of this show, unlike the exceptionally dated qualities of shows like “Knight Rider”, “The A-Team” and especially “Miami Vice” (it’s hard to believe a show about pastel wearing cops who have a pet alligator was ever considered “gritty”).
The new movie is just as stupid as the old show. In fact, it’s even stupider. But that innocent, home-spun charm has been replaced by a volume and shiny things. Instead of the goofy, low-key shenanigans of the television show, we have a loud, bombastic spectacle of cars smashing incoherently into one another while classic rock blares on the soundtrack. Most of the spontaneity and innocence have been drained on the show’s trip to the big screen. Moments of it are a lot of fun, and I actually thought that the first half of the film was a pretty good representation of what worked about the old show, only updated with a wink for the new millennium. However, the movie goes on a lot longer than it has to, and without enough plot to fill an average episode of the series.
For one thing, instead of Boss Hogg and Rosco being buffoons with more schemes than brains, Hogg and Coltrane are pretty evil dudes here. They have none of the silly byplay or the slapstick antics that their predecessors had. And that really hinders the film. One of the few complications of the original show was that Hogg and Coltrane were, deep down, good guys. They were greedy and ambitious, but they didn’t have the ruthlessness or the intellect to be effective scumbags. This angle lent a shade of gray to the usual good vs. evil plotline of the show. Usually there was good (Dukes) and evil (the bad guys from out of town) but there was also the gray area in between (represented by Rosco and Hogg). Without Rosco and Hogg’s greedy incompetence, the average plot of the old show wouldn’t have filled twenty minutes. With that gray area included, the show was safely padded to fill an hour. And, usually, that hour still felt pretty padded. If you blow that scenario up to an hour and a half and remove the Hogg/Rosco moral gray area from the average plot, you might get a sense of just how empty this film feels. Twenty minutes of plot (and that’s being generous) are now providing the skeleton of an hour and forty-five minutes of entertainment. The first half works pretty well with some fun jabs at the old show, a respect for the main characters and some neat car stunts. But the film is coasting on fumes by the hour mark and completely out of gas by the seventy-five minute point. It just doesn’t have enough conflict or fun to fill that much time. It’s stupid, sure, that’s to be expected. No one is going into this film expecting “Hamlet”, for crying out loud. And I’m not even going to complain about the changes made between the movie and the show. That’s not the point. The point is that there’s just not enough material here for an entire film.
There are other problems as well. Willie Nelson is surprisingly lifeless here. Uncle Jesse was the heart and soul of the original series and Willie just doesn’t manage to convey that. Denver Pyle’s absence is sorely felt. And Burt Reynolds is just here to collect a paycheck, as he was in “The Longest Yard” (2005) or “Bean: The Movie” or virtually anything he’s done since “Boogie Nights”. He’s not buffoonish enough to play the Boss Hogg of old and not menacing enough to play the Hogg presented here. He just doesn’t fit. And MC Gainey, while a dependable character actor, is all wrong for the part of Rosco. But at least he’s more menacing than Reynolds.
So what does work? Johnny Knoxville and Seann William “Stiffler” Scott, for one thing. I had my doubts about them, but they are great here. They seem to be in touch with the spirit of this whole enterprise and do a fantastic job as a couple of good ol’ boys with no bigger agenda in mind than driving fast and having a good time. Without them, this movie would be a complete waste of time. But they’ve got charisma. Jessica Simpson, surprisingly, also works well here. All that’s required of her is to look hot and have some spunk, and she fulfills both of those requirements quite well. And the screenplay is quite good in spots. I appreciated the fact that they included The Balladeer (narrator) device and the freeze frames of the old series. It gave the movie a certain flair that kept it from being completely generic. Oh, and I loved the General Lee. This car is the real star of the show, and it’s given plenty of screen time. You can appreciate that Stiffler would be more in love with this car than any of the women in the movie (though the women in the movie are quite lovely, I’m thinking of moving to Hazzard).
Unfortunately, the car chases are filmed and edited in the same haphazard, confusing fashion as they have been in most modern films. There is an art to the car chase that seems, sadly, to be deceased these days. Occasionally, a movie like “The Transporter” or “Ronin” gets it right. But most of the time, (and in this film) we are treated to the same shoddy action choreography that marred movies like the modern “Gone in Sixty Seconds” and “The Bourne Supremacy”. If the filmmakers are going through all the trouble of staging these big action sequences, I’d at least like to see what is happening. Let me see what all that money is being spent on, and I’ll be a much happier camper.
In short, this film is just another mediocre film in what’s turning out to be a very mundane summer. I haven’t seen any films this summer that I’ve flat-out despised, but aside from “Revenge of the Sith” and “War of the Worlds”, I haven’t really seen any good ones either. “The Dukes” has some things that work and some that don’t, and it’s not fun enough to qualify as “dumb fun” which, really, is all that I was asking for. It’s got too many lame jokes, too much incoherent action, too little charm, and less plot than the first “Smokey and the Bandit” (which had virtually no plot).
But at least it’s better than “Smokey and the Bandit 2”.
