“Tom, you were a boyscout, weren’t you?”
“No, but I ate a brownie once.”
To hear the review
That line might be the funniest one in all of Without A Paddle. So, try to imagine something LESS funny than that. And…you’ve pretty much got this movie, which is entirely atrocious, beginning to end. Without A Paddle is one of those movies where, for a moment, Seth Green and Dax Shepard and Matthew Lillard were the Hot Young Comedy Actor Names, and throwing them together in a movie was an obvious thing to do. Actually writing and directing and DOING something with the movie was clearly a secondary concern. We’ve got our “stars”, right? OK, good. Print.
Without A Paddle comes out on Blu-Ray May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and this was the first chance I had to check it out. I haven’t seen the film before, so I have no idea how different the Blu-Ray is than the regular transfer. But I suspect it does not matter one whit. The dialogue is dreadful, the acting even worse, and the utter silliness of the script isn’t even fun silliness. It’s tiresome stupidity. There is an utterly pointless cameo by Burt Reynolds. There is a pointless meeting with two forest-dwelling hotties (who don’t even show their boobs - why not, I can’t imagine. The movie already has a 14A rating, why not go all the way?)
The three childhood friends meet up at the funeral of their other childhood friend, which is a rather sad and melancholy way to begin a movie this idiotic. Open with the tears, close with the stupid, I suppose. They then hatch a plan to carry out their dead buddy’s dream, finding D.B. Cooper’s treasure cache. And then…they fall down holes, get chased by a bear, go over a waterfall, navigate rapids in a canoe, run afoul of drug smugglers, meet creepy mountain men, have to huddle together in their underwear, and fall down and hurt themselves and whine and shriek and cry and so forth. And there is nothing else going on. Except some more unfunny stuff. There’s plenty of that in Without A Paddle.
