Ben
Garant, 2007, USA, 84 mins
Cast: Carlos Alazraqui, Mary Birdsong, Ben Garant
Review by Alan Smithee
Remember the Police
Academy films from the 1980s? Well, imagine they were updated
as a spoof reality TV show…and were even less funny. It doesn’t
seem possible but that is Reno 911: Miami.
Apparently based on a “successful” Comedy Central
series from the States, the movie revolves around a squad
of harebrained cops from the sleepy US city of Reno who suddenly
find themselves the only cops left in the whole of Miami
after their colleagues are poisoned by terrorists at the
National Police Convention. I know, I know, you’re
laughing already. But wait, you haven’t been introduced
to the cast of characters. There’s one cop who’s
a bit gay, one who’s very gay. One woman has big tits,
another has a massive arse. One bloke’s a psycho, the
other’s a bit thick. That’s the level of humour
throughout. The opening gambit is a ten-minute sequence (well,
it feels like ten minutes) where our hapless chums chase
a chicken across a road and then try to shoot it. Other highlights
include characters coming across colleagues having a wank
or topless Russian models heaving their stack at the camera
in the service of a five-second joke.
There’s nothing wrong with goofball comedy, even the
kind like this, aimed squarely at the virginal, testerone-addled
14-year-old. Jim Carrey, Jack Black and Sacha Baron Cohen
have arguably made careers out of it and, on occasion, spun
their vulgar yarns into gold. But those comparing this mush
with Borat have clearly missed the satire of the latter.
After all, satire’s a word of more than one syllable
- such verbal complexity has no place here. And you can forget
any idea of subversive comment – few movies, even in
the service of politically incorrect humour, have paraded
so many misogynist and homophobic jokes in the space of 84
minutes. Roy “Chubby” Brown would have been proud.
Bizarrely, Reno 911 and its crazy
cops seem to have cleaned up across the Pond, but I would
rather suffer 14 years at Her Majesty’s pleasure
than have to sit through another second of it ever again.
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