Rating: Pg-13 For Crude and Sexual humor.
The setup: Three Army stooges (Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall and D..
J. Qualls) marooned in Mexico think they're on a combat mission in Iraq.
What works: A few absurd moments with supporting players David Keith and Danny Trejo.
What doesn't: The sight of spindle-legged Qualls in a Mexican peasant dress is emotionally scarring.
Great scene: The blooper reel that rolls beside the end credits is funnier than most of the actual scenes.
Redneck stereotypes collide with Mexican, Middle Eastern, gay and Army stereotypes in the low-budget, lowbrow "Delta Farce.
" Casualties include the careers of Larry the Cable Guy, whose last movie was Pixar's "Cars," and co-star D.J. Qualls, whose last movie before filming this one, "Hustle and Flow," won an Academy Award.
Can't win 'em all. With "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" regular Bill Engvall in the role of the Third Stooge, they play weekend fantasy soldiers who put on Army surplus camo gear and shoot guns at an abandoned armory during their get-togethers. They are mistaken for Army Reservists by an overzealous sergeant (Keith David, breathing fire from his nostrils) and hauled off to war.
Establishing itself as the only movie ever to use increased violence in Fallujah as its comic mainspring, the film puts its hapless heroes on a cargo plane flying from Georgia to the combat zone. Over Mexico (if you question the geography here, you're already too smart for this movie), they are jettisoned from the plane's hold in a parachute-equipped Humvee. When they wake up in the desert, convinced they're in Iraq, they set out to liberate the nearest village.
Bear Arnold's script is comedy of the most primitive and desultory sort, but it gains a bit of traction as the movie wears on. Opening with cobwebby "don't ask, don't tell" jokes and ugly cracks about "carpet fliers," it gets a bit less abysmal in act two, as if a punch-up screenwriter was brought in to rescue the thing. The boys find themselves defending the village from a gang of over-the-top desperados led by Danny Trejo (last seen as Machete in "Grindhouse"), the king of campy Latino tough guys.
The jokes start to spiral off into absurdity, with nonsequitur gags about karaoke night at the villain's hideout, and the not-to-be-forgotten sight of David in a marabou-trimmed nightie. (Qualls also appears in a Mexican peasant dress. The film even steals from itself.
) The performances are regrettable. Qualls, an actor born to play David Spade's anorexic brother, is essentially a visual joke, a pipsqueak with Rambo fantasies. Larry makes Jim Varney look like Ian McKellen.
Only David and Trejo emerge as likable clowns. The liveliest battle in this atrocious service comedy is fighting the urge to leave midway through.
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