If I had to describe my foremost reaction to ’Dude Where’s My Car?’ in one teensy-bitsy word I’d just yell out ’Wasted’! Yes that’s what it was a wasted basket case of a movie. Just when you think you’ve had enough of toilet humor heaven a no good film maker like Danny Lenier and writer Phillip Stark ( the writer behind ’That 70’s show’) gets before our faces a totally daft teen screwball fare that practically tears the insides of your brain and leaves it all out to dry in some freaking’ mid day sun.
A teen comedy fete gone horribly wrong in the sense and taste department with a story is as pathetic as its title. Two very stupid guys and a car that you never see right till the end of the movie. I won’t be surprised if half through the movie you actually begin to say aloud ’Forget the god damned car, I want a refund on my ticket’!
Jesse and Chester are in a fix, these two losers (literal ones) wake up one morning with prolonged blackout syndrome. They have no recollection of what happened to them the night before, they do know that they were completely ’wasted’ (washed out, doped, drunk…. whatever you make of it). A lot has seemed to have happened in course of that night, they’ve found a lifetime supply of chocolate pudding in their fridge, a strange guy in their closet who urinates on their potted plant and they’re angry girlfriends ’The Twins’ (two girls who don’t look anything alike) who left them a message on their machine forbidding our desperados from ever seeing them again and finally Jesse can’t seem to find his car anywhere.
Mind Boggling eh?
Well what follows close at the foot is a ludicrous adventure that propels these two ’dudes’ (duds more like it!) to meeting a baritone voiced transvestite stripper, cult members that dress in bubble wrap, buxom alien babes who are pretty vocal about giving out carnal party favors, two ’’totally gay’’ Scandinavian studs from planet ’doo-daah’, psychotic ostriches and many other cracked up members of the World Funny Farm Association. And if the story line couldn’t get any asinine Jesse and Chester are in possession of a mysterious cosmic device called the ’continuum…whatever’ that can destroy the universe.
So much for a hogwash contemporary version of ’Bill and Ted’s Excellent adventure’ (need I say that this dudfest had the two heroes chasing time warps in a telephone booth, an insult of a flick starring the veritable Keanu Reeves) merged with jokes that make the ’Austin Powers’ movies look like kiddie banter.
I seriously think teen flicks in the 80’s had more class despite their laid back sometimes cliched humor (ref. ’License to Drive’, ’My secret admirer’, etc). Cliched humor I can deal with but this absolute diddle do of a movie had me struggling through an eternal wormhole of stupidity for 83 minutes.
Venture into this road trip at your own unsolicited peril. Don’t blame me if you come back hating the whole slew of comedy filmmakers. Can you blame them if there are scores of people who actually pay good money to watch movies like ’Dude Where’s my car?’ and walk out of the theater hall either saying ’Good movie ya!’ or ’I’m going to watch it again ya!’ or ’Such a cute movie’. Seriously! Blech! The audiences of today (especially the younger Gen.-X) need a serious debriefing on how differentiate between a funny movie and a tasteless one.