The Chris Brown Connection

The Dukes of Hazzard: Comedy. Starring Seann William Scott, Johnny
Knoxville, Burt Reynolds and Jessica Simpson. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar.
(PG-13. 97 minutes.At Bay Area theaters.)

There are routine movies and others that blaze a trail. There are routine
bad movies and others so horrendous that they redefine bad, that make us look
up synonyms for agonizing and abysmal and then gnash our teeth because the
language has not kept pace with the decline of film. There are even movies
that are so blazingly rotten that they can redefine past experiences and make
us look back on recent weak efforts like "Stealth" or "Fantastic Four" and
think, "Ooh, that was fascinating."

"The Dukes of Hazzard" is hardly some routine bad movie. Rather, it's one
of the elite, right up there with "I Am Curious … Yellow" (1967) and Bo
Derek's "Ghosts Can't Do It" (1990), in stiff competition for the lamest thing
ever put on celluloid. Of course, that makes it, by default, the worst film so
far of the 21st century, but to say that does little to acknowledge the
ambition behind this project. Make no mistake, director Jay Chandrasekhar was
swinging for the fences with this one. He was shooting for the millennium.

The movie establishes, with startling economy, that it's about two
imbeciles. In a sleepy rural county, a red car comes blazing down a country
road, careening and swerving, while the two morons in the front seats yell
"Woo-ooo!" and "Yee-haaa!" These are Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke Duke
(Johnny Knoxville), the loudest, laughingest, hell-raisingest pair of single-
celled organisms ever to get a Georgia driver's license.

They're delivering moonshine for their uncle (Willie Nelson), when Luke
decides to stop for a sexual interlude with some girl. Soon, her father comes
home and gets out the shotgun, and we're launched on a chase scene,
technically the movie's first. This is where the movie derails, though that's
only clear in retrospect. The Dukes are in one car, and their pursuers are in
another. The pursuers are shooting at them, but they miss. Everything bad that
follows can be traced to that one flaw in marksmanship.

Based on the long-running TV series of the same name, which premiered on
CBS in 1979, the movie presents as its heroes a pair of callous, stupid
vandals who go around destroying property and laughing about it. Their saving
grace, we're told, is their good nature. But unlike their vandalism and
stupidity, their good nature is something we have to take on faith. The
depiction of these good ol' boys is essentially caught in a dead zone between
satire and celebration, in which the audience is expected to laugh, but not
pass judgment, and just appreciate the life force that makes fellows want to
shoot flaming arrows into gasoline cans — even if we think their energy is
misdirected.

Easily, 50 percent of the movie consists of chase scenes, and each one is
identical. The boys ride in, cause trouble and ride out laughing, as people
shoot at them. There's no way to care about whether they're caught and no room
for hope that they even could be caught, much less killed. The movie
establishes as a villain Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds), who wants to turn a big
chunk of Hazzard into a coal mine. But given the people who live in Hazzard, a
coal mine sounds good. A landfill sounds good. A meteor sounds good.

Between chases, the Dukes often call upon their cousin Daisy, the
prettiest gal in town, to act sexy and use her feminine wiles on some
bureaucrat. Singer Jessica Simpson, in her first film role, plays these
seduction scenes with admirable self-assurance, but of a kind that's also
faintly embarrassing. It's as if someone told her something about herself that
wasn't quite true.

Three back-to-back chases form the climax. They're excruciating. The
comedy is nonexistent. The filmmakers couldn't buy a laugh in a burning poppy
field. The movie is only 97 minutes long, but it makes time stretch, so that
it's impossible to feel comfortable in one sitting position for more than five
minutes. Instead of releasing this film in theaters, they should have sent it
straight to Guantanamo, at least while it's still legal.

– Advisory: This film contains sexual situations and violence.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.