Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/13/07
While I don't think of myself
that way, Jeff Foxworthy has informed me on more than one occasion that
I might possibly be a redneck. I was born and raised in small-town
central Pennsylvania, the land of back (and sometimes front) yards filled
with junk cars up on blocks and folks dreaming of living the good life
on a disability settlement. I don't like NASCAR, don't listen to
country music, and the blue book value of my car does not rise and fall
depending upon how much gas is in it, but I do know the world of Blue
Collar Comedy Tour veterans Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall pretty
well. Maybe that's why I got such a kick out of their new lowbrow
comedy adventure Delta Farce, which attempts to drop the worst Army
Reservists ever into the Iraq War and only misses by a few thousand miles.
Sincere Larry (Larry the
Cable Guy), sneaky Bill (Bill Engvall) and crazy Everett (DJ Qualls, courageously
playing someone with a different first name) somehow managed to “miss”
their Reserve Unit's deployment to Iraq. One weekend a month, they
still head out to the base to drive trucks, shoot guns and watch TV.
But with manpower stretched to its' limit, the Army sends the brutal Sgt.
Kilgore (Keith David) to bring them in. En route to Fallujah, the
threesome sneaks a nap in the back of a jeep when their plane encounters
turbulence and must drop equipment to avoid a crash. Along with that
equipment, they inadvertently drop the three guys and their Sergeant, who
land in the middle of a vast desert. Kilgore isn't moving, so the
guys write him off for dead and load up their equipment to get on with
their “mission”. Ignoring all evidence that they're not actually
in the Middle East, they've soon stumbled upon a town where their firepower
overwhelms a couple of local thugs. The townspeople treat them as
heroes, and it takes a whole lot of tacos and mariachi bands to persuade
the troops that they're actually in Mexico. But their incursion into
a foreign land has roused the ire of Carlos Santana (Danny Trejo), a local
gangster who, at his secret lair, presides over nightly debauchery such
as ventriloquism, karaoke, and professional wrestling.
As I see it, there are two
kinds of people: the kind who can't help but chuckle when a character
says “You have saved our village by killing Carlos Santana” and the kind
who roll their eyes with disdain. I'm the former, and Delta Farce's
cheerful stupidity had me laughing out loud more often than not.
This is a larger-budgeted cousin to the kind of movies they used to run
on USA Up All Night, with little regard for the mechanics of plot
or geography (I know the government's inefficient, but flying troops to
Iraq through Mexico could be a new low), but a keen eye for lowbrow one-liners
and crazy-weird situations. In that regard, the movie makes great
use of two talented comedians who rarely get to flex their silly muscles:
David and Trejo. Nobody does comic testosterone better than David:
his turn as a demented Vietnam vet in Emilio Estevez's Men at Work is
one of the most delightfully silly performances I've ever seen. Watching
his “killing machine” Kilgore burn as Santana's men heap one bizarre humiliation
after another on him (I particularly loved the method of “torture” they
choose to extract information) is a hoot. And Trejo, so often cast
as a generic thug, can undercut that image with moments of inspired lunacy.
Carlos Santana may be his funniest role ever: there's a LOT of strange
stuff going on at his headquarters, and he's not the kind of man to launch
a counter-attack in the middle of karaoke night. And yes, my sense
of humor is such that I laughed just about every time anyone called him
by name. Qualls is also “all in” as the bizarre Everett, who'd be
right at home by Carlos's side if only they weren't enemies. His
ever-present Slim-Jim may well have paid for the entire production, but
he uses it as a great comic prop.
But enough about the real
actors, what about the comedians? Engvall has a great natural charm,
and commands the screen well enough that you wouldn't finger him as a non-actor.
Not so for Larry, who couldn't seem less like a real thespian if he was
wearing a T-shirt to that effect. But he does have a certain goofy
charm, albeit not quite enough to explain in any way why local beauty Maria
(Marisol Nichols) falls for him.
Of course, none of this will
interest most observers nearly as much as the fact that Delta Farce
represents
one of the first military comedies ever to directly reference an ongoing,
wildly unpopular war. And here, the film isn't quite as dumb as it
pretends to be. The metaphor is pretty clear: to invade Mexico
instead of Iraq makes about as much sense as invading Iraq itself, and
that one way we got there is by being such a culturally illiterate nation
that we really only see the world as made up of White People and Ethnics.
It's not just that Larry, Bill and Everett mistake Mexico for Iraq.
Not even that they can't tell the difference between Mexicans and Iraqis,
or recognize the Spanish language. These guys are so clueless that
at one point they see a smiling Hispanic portrait on the side of a building
and can't decide if he looks more like Saddam Hussein or the Indian clerk
at the Circle K. How's this for irony: Chicago-born actress
Nichols, who's of Mexican descent, is currently playing an Arab on 24.
None of which is to say we're
talking about Thank You For Smoking here, the movie still takes
advantage of every chance to make fart, gay and redneck jokes about the
conflict and the military in general. Because the war is such a sore
subject, many will likely find it tasteless, unpatriotic, or naive.
But at the end of the day, it's a comfort food fantasy about the ultimate
uncomfortable issue: don't we all wish victory in Iraq was as simple
as kicking Carlos Santana's ass?
I hope Delta Farce
goes over well with those soldiers who didn't have the good luck to be
misdirected to Mexico: the USO is distributing free copies to bases
around the world, and our troops could certainly use a good laugh.
For those of us at home, if you've ever used a rag for a gas cap, well,
you just might wanna give Delta Farce a try. |
