Review
WITHOUT A PADDLE
Starring Seth Green, Matthew Lillard and Dax Shepard
Directed by Steven Brill
Opens Friday, August 20
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The annual, late summer blitzkrieg of crappy movies, which studios hope we’ll forgive and forget, has blown into the theatres with a vengeance. Without a Paddle is the latest in an ongoing string of crimes against humanity being perpetrated by director Steven Brill.
Little Nicky, Heavyweights and Mr. Deeds weren’t an evil enough attack on the collective North American psyche for Brill. Now he brings us the inhuman torture of Seth Green and Matthew Lillard as a pair of lifelong friends, Dr. Mott and Jerry, on a treasure hunt for D.B. Cooper’s stolen cash with their buddy Tom (Dax Shepard).
Collaborating with the twisted minds of the infamous and much feared screenwriting team of Fred Wolf, Harris Goldberg, Tom Nursall, Jay Leggett and Mitch Rouse, Brill torments his captive audience with an incomprehensible mix of stoner Cheech and Chong humour, "chick flick" sap, and Moral Majority preachiness that would shame even Jerry Falwell.
But, like all masters in the art of agony, Without a Paddle’s evil creators compound their criminality. Heretical bastardizations of Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Deliverance abound, manipulating the emotions of thirtysomething boys in an attempt to make them impotent with the overwhelming force of nostalgia and cuteness. Moreover, these crimes ride a message of conformity that would make Tyler Durden rage against the machine – if only he could escape from the clouded minds of a generation of men raised by women.
And if these human rights violations aren’t enough to have Brill convicted in the Hague, there are always the specific crimes he commits against his big-screen captives. Abraham Benrubi suffers the indignity of being bombed with the fecal matter of two lovely, albeit hairy, tree huggers; Rachel Blanchard is forced to smile while wearing a pair of fur stockings; Bart the Bear has to pretend the insufferable Seth Green is his cub; and Burt Reynolds is unmercifully pushed into an awful Dan Haggerty impersonation, picking up where Grizzly Adams left off all those years ago.
Secretary General Kofi Annan needs to call for a World Court investigation into Paramount Pictures’ malicious abuse of defenceless audience members. Perhaps then Brill can be brought to justice and his unchecked spite toward all things sacred will come to an end. |
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