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Nothing Works in Ill-Conceived Army Comedy
Best friends Larry (Larry the Cable Guy), Everett (DJ Qualls) and Bill (Bill Engvall) are losers with sorry lives. Larry has just lost both his job and his girlfriend. Bill is married to a nagging shrew (Lisa Lampanelli) and has a couple of annoying kids to boot. And Everett is a security guard who makes his home in a shed at a storage facility.
So, these three weekend warriors ordinarily welcome the periodic reprieve from their misery which arrives when they serve as National Guard reserves on the base where they’re stationed in Chattahoochee, Georgia. For once a month, they get a male-bonding opportunity to shoot guns, drink beer, and leer at the waitresses at the local Hooters.
Everything changes, however, the day that, with the Army stretch to the limit, the pencil pushers in the Pentagon decide to call up this ill-equipped trio of misfits. Hard-boiled Sergeant Kilgore (Keith David) soon arrives to whip them into shape, and before you can say “Be all that you can be!” they’re whisked onto a plane headed for Fallujah.
But a funny thing happens on the way to Iraq, and the unit is accidentally ejected en route over a desert in Mexico, where it takes them forever to realize that they haven’t landed in a battle zone. Don’t be duped, if this premise sounds at all appealing, for Delta Farce is easily one of the worst films released this year.
The picture’s low production values are strikingly reminiscent of all those deliberately cheesy Three Stooges shorts from the Thirties and Forties, except for the distinct difference that this flick is never ever funny. I’m warning you, Moe, don’t even consider this disaster, unless you’re the type inclined to laugh at an insufferable sarge referring to his men as “maggots,” “numb nuts,” Mongoloids,” “ladies,” and “candy asses” ad nauseam. Nyuk. Nyuk. Nyuk.
The film also features not one, but two homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” jokes, and lots of lame attempts at humor which rely on your being comfortable with stale cliches about Arabs and Latinos. For instance, the Mexican villain (Danny Trejo) wears a black hat, has a pockmarked face, a handlebar moustache and a glistening gold tooth. And much is made of his name being Carlos Santana, as if that alone ought to be hilarious.
The transparent plot revolves around our heroes’ effort to save a tiny town, and to rescue a fair maiden, Maria (Marisol Nichols), from the clutches of Santana’s bloodthirsty gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Despite incessant gunfire, no one on ever gets shot. About the worst that happens is that a fruit stand is knocked over in a chase scene. What a novel idea! I’ve never seen that in a movie before.
Equally-innovative when it comes to bodily functions, Delta Farce is stocked with fart, spit, digestive, feces and urine gags, my favorite being when Kilgore unwittingly drinks a glass of fluid excreted from Everett’s bladder. One of those movies that’s great until the movie starts.
Poor (0 stars)
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May 2007
