Delta Farce
Directed by C.B. Harding
Written by Bear Aderhold and Tom Sullivan
Starring Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Little and DJ Qualls
Classification: PG
Rating: *
Larry is an American loser. He loses his girlfriend and job in the same day, grabs some takeout from Hooters and meets up with his buddies - the sort of folk who sprayed down Paxil-riddled children with garden hoses - in order to commiserate. From this depressing opener, the new Larry the Cable Guy vehicle proceeds to lose itself too.
Delta Farce's writers (Bear Aderhold and Tom Sullivan) have furnished Larry with a pair of moronic friends to keep him company. But these are not fools in the grand tradition of The Three Stooges or even Dumb & Dumber. Instead, we get Bill (Bill Little), so cowed by his wife that his only joy lies in threatening to sue everyone, and Everett (DJ Qualls), a nervous meerkat of a man who longs for the glories of battle.
When Sergeant Kilgore arrives in town and mistakenly recruits these schmos into the U.S. Army, there is a glimmer of hope as we imagine a flurry of bullets, followed by everyone falling dead and the scrolling of end credits. No such luck.
Sgt. Kilgore does send Larry and Co. on a plane heading for Iraq ("I read somewhere 'dem carpet fliers don't even use toilet paper," Larry offers). But because of a series of confusions the trio wakes one morning in a Mexican desert, which they mistake for a Middle East combat zone. Everett, in a surge of enthusiasm, shoots the first mule that lumbers past and accosts its Mexican owners ("Are you a Turd or a Shitite?").
Here, another glimmer of hope flickers on. Will Delta Farce crystallize into a critique of the war in Iraq and the headstrong stratagems of the Bush administration? American soldiers mistake a friendly nation for a battlefield and proceed to violate international laws by enforcing their notion of what's right - sounds like the start of something smart. Wrong again.
Delta Farce is so relentlessly racist (and homophobic), without ever having the intelligence to pass that bigotry off as satire, that viewers will be left thinking Borat has a soft touch. If you're hungry for comical interpretations of an errant war, may I suggest any episode of M*A*S*H - or, indeed, any episode of Fox News.
After ensuring that all scraps of wit are firmly squashed, Larry and his buddies embark on madcap adventures to "liberate" a Mexican village from roaming banditos - a band of tequila-swilling stereotypes led by the evil Carlos Santana (Danny Trejo), who, when not shooting things, enjoys karaoke, wrestling and sitting on his throne of hubcaps.
Handily, the beautiful Maria (where'd she come from?) is so enamoured of gun-slinging Larry that she consents to becoming his war bride (of course, in the movie, they just say it's love).
While we might pass these facile high jinks off as par for the course from a director whose greatest previous success was The Osbournes, it bears remembering that Delta Farc e is no singular event. A slew of American war movies has been recently pelted at us - including the thinly veiled propaganda that is 300 - and Delta Farce is simply an unabashed apotheosis of a larger dumbing down.
Special to The Globe and Mail