With the possible exceptions of right-wing
radio hosts and left-wing documentary filmmakers, nobody has benefited more
from the culture war than Larry The Cable Guy. If this were a just, utopian world
where liberals and conservatives could calmly discuss their differences and
arrive at solutions everyone could live with, Larry The Cable Guy wouldn't
exist. He'd still be known as Dan Whitney, a harmlessly hacky radio DJ treating
his small cadre of listeners to hiii-larious zingers about Michael Jackson
running day-care centers, between Nickelback and Hinder cuts on the morning
zoo-crew shift. But this is not a just, utopian world. In our world, Larry The
Cable Guy gets to make fart jokes in sold-out arenas from coast to coast,
because his obvious, virulent anti-PC shtick supposedly offends big-city
liberal folk, and offending other people is always good for a laugh, even when
your terrible, shopworn jokes aren't. With Witless Protection—another lazy, wretched
entry in an epically undistinguished filmography—Larry reveals that the
joke is ultimately on his fans, and he's yukking it up all the way to the bank.
Larry plays a borderline cognitively disabled
police officer who kidnaps government witness Ivana Milicevic because he
mistakenly believes that the FBI agents protecting her are drug dealers. If
that makes any sense whatsoever, the other mysteries of Witless Protection might be within your grasp.
Why, for example, would former MTV blow-up doll Jenny McCarthy date an
overweight, obnoxious man with poor hygiene and worse one-liners? (Larry
affectionately calls her "big-titted and quick-witted," a description that also
partially applies to Larry himself.) And why would a movie released in 2008
feature a scene where the "hero" calls an Arab-American innkeeper "Pamperhead"
without an immediate comeuppance? Amazingly, in spite of Larry's potent
hatefulness, Witless positions
him as a loveable li'l lardbutt who charms his prissy captive with lame racist
and sexist witticisms that would make most bigots roll their eyes.
Larry The Cable Guy is a cancerous boil on the
ass of comedy, but it's still sort of shocking how little effort he puts into
his movies. Surely a man who ranks among the most successful comics working
today could attract better collaborators than Witless Protection writer-director Charles
Robert Carner, whose past credits consist entirely of TV movies like 1994's One Woman's Courage with Patty
Duke and 2002's Christmas
Rush (also
known as Breakaway) with Dean Cain and Erika
Eleniak. Then again, talent like Carner comes cheap. As Larry The Cable Guy's
Mephistophelian manager J.P. Williams recently told The Los Angeles
Times, his
movies always sell enough DVDs to cover their small budgets. Trying to make
something decent would mess up a lucrative operation.