Crimes:
• Bein' incredibly dumb
• Bein' incredibly lazy
• Not only making a joke about Iraq's "Turds and Shitites," but actually reusing it later as though it were funny the first time
Defender: Director C.B. Harding.
Tone of commentary: Jovial, ingratiating. Harding loudly slurps margaritas ("Well, you gotta do something if you’re gonna sit in a room for two hours and yak!") and worries that he's being boring—after explaining the mechanics of one pick-up shot, he adds, "Boy, that's an exciting piece of information, isn't it? Wow." But mostly, he happily chatters about how much fun the film was to make, in spite of the many production problems, and even though he didn't get to "play" as much as everyone else: "I kind of had to be the stern parent sometimes, which was kind of a drag."
What went wrong: The Department Of Defense withdrew its support at the last minute, causing a scramble for locations. The whole film was shot in 29 days, necessitating constant rushing and panic. The heat was horrific, and Harding blew some takes by coughing uncontrollably due to all the dust. And Keith David, while "swaggering around" on his first day on set, ignored warnings about a rickety railing, sat on it, and fell seven feet, breaking two ribs. He subsequently played his screaming military badass role with his shirt secretly stuffed full of ice packs.
Comments on the cast: Larry The Cable Guy "loves to eat," which Harding describes as "the bane of my existence," because in any scene involving food or meals, Larry would "eat the props" during the lighting and camera tests. Also, Keith David initially resisted the scene where he dons a transparent baby-doll nightie, but eventually "he really got into it, perhaps because he started to realize he was kinda cute in it."
Inevitable dash of pretension: Harding repeatedly boasts about his ugly scene-changes: "This is sort of a silly fable, and in that, I realized that it's not about cuts, the transitions are about wipes, so it was one of the very first things I set in motion, and it really paid off."
Commentary in a nutshell: "Something I learned on this movie that I will never, never, ever in my life forget—and this goes out to any budding filmmaker or writer—if you ever need anything funny, and you want to guarantee the audience will laugh, give children some kind of instrument to beat adults up."