Witless Protection
Directed by Charles Robert Carner
Starring Larry the Cable Guy, Ivana Milicevic, Jenny McCarthy
Lionsgate Home Video
Release date: June 10, 2008

My favorite part about a comedy is, obviously, the laughs. Not because I like laughing (which I do), but because what is a comedy if you don’t laugh? I hate one-joke comedians whose one joke isn’t even funny, but what do I hate more than that? Comedians who keep continuing the one joke to make money off of it. If that was a felony, Larry the Cable Guy would be on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Larry the Cable Guy, if you have no idea who in the hell he is, is a “comedian” that travels around the world with his famous redneck jokes. He must have made so much money off of them with the Blue Collar Comedy Troupe (and according to IMDb, he makes more money one year than I do with this writing gig). Other than the annoying redneck jokes, he often makes fun of cripples, races, political parties, and farting noises. Oh, and he occasionally makes fun of incest, too. I told you that he was an annoying retard.

His newest film, Witless Protection, wound up in my mailbox thanks to my editors. Yes, even after the very unfunny Health Inspector movie and the racist Delta Farceof last year, I still went out of my way to watch Witless Protection, just to make sure I wasn’t missing out on a gem of Larry the Cable Guy. The results are about as predictable as the plot of this film. I thought that the film’s IMDb rating of 1.7 was just a bunch of Larry the Cable Guy haters seeking their revenge on the fat guy. At least, if that is what they were doing, they had a great reason for doing so.

Witless Protection follows Larry (Larry the Cable Guy), a sheriff in a small-town who tries to be the hero and rescue a woman who didn’t need rescuing (Ivana Milicevic). After abducting her from FBI agents, he learns that she was actually a witness to an Enron-esque business scheme and was going to be on the stand to put these people out of their jobs and into prison. But when Larry finds out that the woman he just kidnapped wasn’t actually in witness protection, nor was she being protected by them. She was actually going to be killed, but Larry saves her in the nick of time. Can he do so once more?

I don’t think I have to go into any more detail about the film because I’m sure you already know what to expect. My long-time readers are expecting me to say “fuck this” and “fuck that,” but I’m not going to in this review. If Larry can make a joke unfunny without using the f-word, I can at least bring up a few points without having to use any of the seven dirty words. And in like most of Larry the Cable Guy’s films, fart jokes, redneck jokes, incest jokes, racial jokes, and political jokes are thrown out throughout the film. God forbid if the guy actually shows some range.

Also starring in this film is the Jenny McCarthy. Lionsgate is selling this film as a film starring the two of them side-by-side, but in all actuality, the two are only in the film for about three scenes together, and McCarthy is only in the film for about four. And only in a Larry the Cable Guy movie can you make Jenny McCarthy look like a redneck.

Ivana Milicevic is more of the soft-spot of the film. Talent never resides with her, but beauty does through the picture. Alfred Hitchcock once said that the worst thing that happened to film was how it was given sound and dialogue to replace story-telling. With her character, there is no telling of any story. Both her and Larry have no actual chemistry together, and to replace every last bit of the chemistry that those two had, the scriptwriters and the two created useless dialogue to tell the story in which their was no means of telling.

And by the end of the film, there is neither a laugh nor chuckle from any of the cast members. We’re not to blame anyone for this other than Larry the Cable Guy himself for putting us in such of a shithole of a movie. Yes, Hitchcock said that dialogue was terrible when it came to replacing story-telling, but Jesus Christ, he never said that we couldn’t use it every once in a while and actually be funny. I have seen tons and tons of movies of his and not one of them, not even the “Blue Collar” movies, made me smirk or chuckle. And like the failure of Witless Protection, we have no one to blame but him.

I think the best thing that I could say about Witless Protection is that it is better than Health Inspector and Delta Farce, but saying that one is better than the other is like saying World War I is better than World War II.

Witless Protection comes out today. Also being released today is Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, the bloody but fantastic horror flick The Signal, and the Jim Sturgess film The Other Boleyn Girl. I suggest you use your twenty bucks more wisely and buy a film that is actually decent.

½ out of ****