THE DUKES OF HAZZARD

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Preserving Southern Isolation
TV-Show-Based Movie Keeps Its Foot In Its Mouth
By Cole Smithey

It's wretched to think that the "Dukes Of Hazzard" television show lasted six seasons (from 1979 to 1985). It's even sadder to see that Hollywood has seen fit to package the stupidity-flaunting storyline into yet another 2005 summer bummer feature.

With an anachronistic confederate flag emblazoned on the roof of "General Lee," their 1969 Dodge Charger, cousins Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke (Johnny Knoxville) displace their concerns for smuggling moonshine to saving Hazzard, Georgia from being turned into a coal mine by corrupt commissioner Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds).

Forget that the notoriously red southern states couldn't care less about ecological conservation. This movie allows its southern dimwitted stereotypes to have their cake and eat it too. A plethora of southern rock music, from the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Charlie Daniels Band and Molly Hatchet, stinks up the already rancid piece of cinematic codswallop.

Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott carry out their typecast goofball misfit roles with a decidedly yankee attitude that never translates into the southern mentality of their shout-a-lot characters. As such, Knoxville and Scott mock their characters' southern archetypes with a masochistic glee that's as uncomfortable to watch as the repetitive car chase scenes between the uneducated cops and the "good ole boys."

There isn't a story in the movie so much as there are repeated sequences of riffing humor that isn't funny on the first or even ninth time you see it. Jessica Simpson provides a distinctly celibate air of sexuality as Bo Duke's bodacious sister Daisy. Daisy persistently shakes her barely clad bum and mannequin-like cleavage in the faces of law officers to extricate Bo and Luke from incarceration.

So it's oddly satisfying when a butch female officer shuts down Daisy's patronizing bump-and-grind act late in the movie. Although we don't get a reaction shot of Daisy's face, there's sufficient subtext to the scene to infer that the tough talking woman cop is just what Daisy requires to unbridle her counterintuitive passions.

There are two derailing sequences that push the bluntly comic narrative into a territory of anti-confederate hatred. It puts the good ole boys in a position of ignorant victims. When Bo and Luke drive to Atlanta to get soil samples identified at a university there, vehemently angry citizens confront them about the fascist imagery of the confederate flag that adorns the top of their car.

Although the boys were not responsible for their mechanic's decision to put the flag on the car, they take the brunt of verbal abuse from fellow drivers who berate them for the image.

This confrontational urban animosity against the image, and consequently Bo and Luke, is allowed to reach a fever pitch when they drive through a black neighborhood after engaging in buffoonery that has left their faces covered in black soot. A group of young black men set about delivering the kind of ass-kicking you'd expect under the circumstances.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ("Super Troopers") interrupts the potential violence with a silly voice-over narration about the boys being up sh** creek without a paddle, or a canoe, before a police car conveniently intervenes. The canny subtext of the scene is that racism is still allowed in the rural south, but is not accepted in its urban areas.

"The Dukes Of Hazzard" is a movie that makes you feel unclean. Willie Nelson presents the only likable character in the movie as Uncle Jesse. Nelson's singular service to the script is to interject as many one-two punchline jokes as possible.

In quick fire succession Jessie says, "What do you call a farmer with a sheep under each arm?" "A playboy." "What do you get when you cross a donkey with an onion?" "A piece of ass that will bring a tear to your eye." And that's about as satisfying as the movie gets.

Rated PG-13. 100 mins.