THE DUKES OF HAZZARD
(three stars)
Good ol’ time.
Running time: 103 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual content, crude and drug-related humor, profanity, action violence). At the Empire, the Orpheum, the Kips Bay, others.
YOU might think “The Dukes of Hazzard” is just a bunch of hillbilly jokes and cars gone airborne. And you’d be right.
But consider how many mistakes it doesn’t make. It doesn’t move the action to the Hamptons. It doesn’t tell us to hug it out when we need a “Yeehaw!” It doesn’t explain that poor Boss Hogg got mean because his daddy was a dentist and it doesn’t put Ewan McGregor and Jake Gyllenhaal behind the wheel of the General Lee.
In the production notes, producer Bill Gerber holds that the humor “is meant to be accessible,” and the movie indeed resists the temptation to quote Alexander Pope or choreograph the chases to the sounds of string quartets.
Cousins Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke (Johnny Knoxville) Duke live in a Confederacy of dunces, where a charity seeks aid for “anal bifida,” inspiration comes from the audiotape memoirs of Al Unser Jr. and a guy captures armadillos so he can use their shells as helmets.
Together with their cousin Daisy Duke (Jessica Simpson), whose purpose is to distract cops by modeling her eponymous shorts, the Dukes do nothing but fight (when one loses a bet, the other gets to belt him in the jaw with a phone book), race (going round and round a rotary in a squealing 45-degree skid) and clown (they scrounge up some big laughs from one of the stupidest scenes, in which they pose as Japanese businessmen).
Except for the AC/DC on the soundtrack and a passing admission that the Confederate flag looks racist to some (though not to the clueless Dukes), the flick is exactly like the 1979-85 TV series, the one that inspired my 16-year-old brother to declare himself a rebel, pin the Stars and Bars over his bed in our house in Massachusetts and begin spending his leisure hours leading the police on high-speed chases.
The action regularly hits freeze-frame to give us homespun narration from Junior Brown (“If you have to go to the bathroom, now would be the wrong time”), who sounds like the TV balladeer, the late Waylon Jennings. When you can’t get Waylon, though, his old pal Willie Nelson will do, and Willie has a dandy ol’ time as the cop-hating Uncle Jesse, who has “been two places in his life: Hazzard County and Korea.” Jesse even smokes some wacky weed in a scene Nelson has spent much of his life preparing for.
Even better is Burt Reynolds, who in the latest of many comebacks finally steals scenes as the nefarious white-suited pol, Boss Hogg. Instead of blustering like the fat guy who played Hogg on TV, Reynolds exudes the same cool sense of control he did in “Smokey and the Bandit,” the movie that sired the Dukes in the first place (along with the overlooked 1974 flick “Moonrunners,” a solid B movie).
Scott, too, is irresistibly funny, alternating between sunny brainlessness and a crazy-eyed love for danger, like Butt-head on wheels. Bo drags Luke behind the General Lee on a chain, at first because he’s distracted by an Air Supply song on the radio but later because it’s just so damn much fun.
Knoxville, who inexplicably gets top billing, struggles to come up with stiff-looking reactions to Scott’s antics, and Simpson is pretty much a pretty blank. In a smallishrole, though, Kevin Heffernan makes his minutes as memorable as a swig of white lightning. Looking like a psychotic Drew Carey, he brings a nicely restrained dementia to the part of Sheev, a bait-shop survivalist who loves to blow up stuff.
A lot of its jokes sputter and it doesn’t contain even a hint of a chick movie, but “The Dukes of Hazzard” has a bit of the same fratty energy as “Wedding Crashers.” Among the summer’s retreads, it doesn’t try as hard to be hip as “The Longest Yard” or “Bewitched,” and that works fine. Not trying too hard is what being a good ol’ boy is all about.