I Watched This On Purpose: Witless Protection

By Nathan Rabin | July 16, 2008 | 5:19pm

Film Features Film

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club
isn't impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is
why there's I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to
spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments,
playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward. And a good time.

Cultural infamy: The A.V. Club's own estimable Steven Hyden
gave Witless Protection a rare F,
though I admit that I was so jealous that Steve got to review Witless
Protection that I hired a hitman to off
him. Then I realized I'd overreacted, and I ordered the hitman to take Steve
out for an ice-cream sundae. So Steve, let me know if a scary hitman-looking
dude didn't take you out for ice cream shortly after your Witless
Protection review. I might still be able to
get my money back.

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Steve's pan was even more bewildering considering his review was
accompanied by the attached photograph.

How can any film with the image of Larry The Cable Guy holding a
camouflage baseball hat over his genitals not be hilarious? C'mon: the hat, the
genitals, the guy with the rubber glove in the background. It works on so many
levels! The rest of the liberal, Jew-run media shared Hyden's contempt for the
film: Its Metacritic score is a paltry 17. In comments which I lazily harvested
from the film's Metacritic page, The Boston Globe's Ty Burr derided it as "harmless dum-dum stuff," while The New York Times hissed, "The slapstick and set pieces are lame, and its performances
range from competent to annoying." Clearly all these fancy-pants critics were
wrong. It's up to me to trumpet from every mountaintop the overlooked genius of
Larry The Cable Guy.

Curiosity factor: I've long been
fascinated by the cult of Larry The Cable Guy, the hillbilly (I'm sorry:
Rural-American) alter-ego of a struggling Nebraska stand-up comic named Daniel
Laurence Whitney. Yes, that's right, Larry The Cable Guy shares a home state
with Dick Cavett, though if Cavett's equally broad character "Billy Bob The
Flatulent Plumber" had taken off, I think we'd all view Cavett a lot
differently today. A lot of people have difficulty separating comedians from
their stage personas. Woody Allen, for example, is actually a strikingly
handsome 7-foot-tall Swedish man. Yet he's so convincing as that nebbishy
"Woody Allen" guy that people often mistake him for the character he's playing.

I nurse a similarly inexplicable fascination with Jenny McCarthy,
particularly her performance in Dirty Love. (Hey, there's a movie one of my colleagues
should totally watch on purpose.) Whenever I feel sad or anxious, I just think
about the scene in Dirty Love where
McCarthy slips around in a giant pool of her own menstrual blood, and a sense
of beatific calm sweeps over me. Ahhh, bliss. What happens when these two comic
geniuses collide? I was about to find out.

The viewing experience: But before finding out, I decided to watch a special
feature on the DVD called "Larry's Use of the Analogy." I was worried that a
lot of the film's humor would fly over my head (I'm one of those dum-dums that
doesn't even have a post-graduate degree), and I figured this feature would act
as a Rosetta Stone to help me understand the subtleties of Mr. Guy's
sophisticated comic sensibility. Mere non-Larry The Cable Guy words cannot do justice
to this dissertation on wordplay and cat-eating jungle babies, so here's the
entire special feature for your edification. You're welcome.

I was now prepared to drink in
the cinemagic of Witless Protection. The
film casts Larry as a humble, working-class guy named Larry who dreams of
becoming an FBI agent, yet toils as a humble backwoods cop. McCarthy co-stars
as Larry's girlfriend, a scantily clad, kiss-my-grits waitress Larry lovingly
describes as "big-titted and quick-witted." (She lives up to at least half of
that description.) The screenplay subtly conveys that Larry dreams of bigger
things by giving him dialogue like "Yeah, I do dream of bigger things."

That bigger thing arrives in the
form of a mysterious woman (Ivana Milicevic), whom Larry hails as "hotter than
an electric prod on a hog's ass." (I recently learned that's what's called an
"analogy.") Larry sizes up the mystery woman as a hostage (why else would she
be accompanied by large, suit-wearing black man Yaphet Kotto?) and decides to
rescue her, in spite of McCarthy begging him to fuck her instead. (Mmmmm,
that's good realism!) I should probably point out that Larry, did not, in fact,
write the screenplay. Here's the white-trash Gable and Lombard in action:

Who can unravulate the mysteries
of women indeed? Later, the self-described "sweev and de-boner" lawman tries to
rescue Milicevic, only to learn that she doesn't want to be rescued, especially
after he promises to "execute a flawless ejaculation." At this point, I laughed
so hard, I was gasping for air. Then I realized I wasn't laughing at all, and
my breathing returned to normal.

When Milicevic impatiently tries
to explain that she isn't a kidnap victim and her "kidnappers" are actually FBI
agents protecting her so she can travel to Chicago to testify against slumming
bad guy Peter Stormare, Larry figures she has "Stockyard Syndrome" and has been
brainwashed. Clearly, only two things can improve this scene: fart jokes and
incongruous swipes at liberals. Both are forthcoming.

The two become a mismatched pair
on the run. Milicevic is a fancy lady who uses words like "venality" and
"chicanery." Larry is, well, Larry, with his genius for mangling the English
language and his undying love of sleeveless flannel shirts. It's like Midnight
Run, only terrible.

You know, I could set up this
next clip, but I think it's best experienced blind.

Milicevic asks to be returned to
Kotto, but Larry decides that Kotto is corrupt and insists on taking Milicevic
to Chicago himself, so the movie doesn't end after a merciful 30 minutes.

People have accused Larry of
being culturally insensitive or even racist, but the following scene, where
Larry engages in a delicate dance of cross-cultural communication with an
immigrant motel proprietor, should put all that talk to rest. I hope you feel
ashamed of yourself, David Cross.

What's that? You'd like to see an
out-of-context clip of Larry the Cable Guy vomiting, then sifting through his
own puke, followed by Larry The Cable Guy near-nudity? Your wish is my command.

As the film heads into its third act,
the Milicevic/Larry banter gives way to action-movie machinations, as Stormare
and his goons attempts to stop Milicevic from testifying against him. We do
learn, however, about the tragic obesity of Larry's sister. Apparently she's so
portly that she went to the racetrack wearing a Goodyear T-shirt, and a pilot
crawled up her ass and tried to fly her. That's the kind of tender touch that
really humanizes Larry's character.

This piece is already running too
long and I'm getting the "wrap-it-up" hand-signal from Keith, but I wouldn't
want to spare you the sight of Larry repeatedly punching an ostensibly dead
woman in a comical manner.

For all you film majors out
there, this is what your professors mean when they talk about "The Lubitsch
Touch." Oh, and that is Joe Mantegna in a crazy fright wig as a swishy doctor
with the aforementioned morbidly obese wife. How come Mamet never writes him
parts that good?

Mantegna's hometown and my own
beloved city gets a nice little showcase in this surprisingly sweet clip
illustrating what Chicago looks like through the eyes of Larry The Cable Guy.

Though only time will tell if
Larry's character ever gets to achieve his dream of getting "a nut rub from
Scarlett Johansson," he emerges victorious, foiling Stormare's evil plot and
impressing both the FBI agents (who offer him a job) and Milicevic, who gives
him a peck on the cheek. But Larry rejects the FBI's offer and returns to his
humble hometown and the promise of a lifetime of hot sex with Jenny McCarthy.
The man truly is a saint.

How much of the experience
wasn't a total waste of time? About 50 percent.
In the early going, Witless Protection is the kind of shameful,
cornball, proudly offensive guilty pleasure I'm secretly excited about getting
to review on a regular basis. But as the film drags on interminably (is there
any reason this couldn't have run 80 minutes instead of 97?) the guilt-to-pleasure
ratio tilts heavily toward guilt. If they'd thrown in some of McCarthy's
trademark menstrual-blood-based slapstick, however, I suspect the final
statistic would have rocketed up to 100.