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Written by XXX; directed by XXX; starring Seth Green, Dax Shephard and Matthew Lilliard. Released to DVD on January 11, 2005. Knowledge can occasionally be a double-edged sword. With a fairly decent comprehension of the psychology of the human mind, I can no longer classify people with tattoos and body piercings as being ‘cool’, as I did throughout college and my early twenties. Knowing that extreme tattoos and piercings almost always signify a traumatized person’s attempt to assert some form of control over their body and environment, ‘cool’ just isn’t the adjective that I would use to describe them any more. Also possessing an understanding of some of the more complex issues plaguing intimate relationships, I am often taken out of the moment when watching Hollywood’s romantic comedies. "She’s not playing hard to get!" I will want to yell at the leading man on the movie screen, "She’s bi-polar! Why the hell are you falling for her?" There are certain cinematic conventions that just don’t change and one of the most steadfast of these is the fact that audiences are always supposed to be rooting for the guy and the girl to get back together, whether it’s in the couple’s best interests or not. As director Stephen Brill’s Without a Paddle wound down and one of the major characters finally and excitedly reconnected with his estranged girlfriend, I closed my eyes and shook my head. They would have been far better off on their own. It wasn’t as egregious a climactic reunion as Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston’s in Along Came Polly or George Pepard and Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it still didn’t work. Wondering about why Brill had felt the need to put the two back together, I realized that, like everything else about the project, Without a Paddle closely followed the rules and regulations of a mid-‘80s comedy (just imagine any movie with Chevy Chase or John Candy). And lest anyone go home from the theater unhappy, the guys always solved the mysteries, found the treasure, saved their houses, kept their jobs and always, always got the girls. Seth Green, Matthew Lillard and Dax Shephard star in Without a Paddle as three high school friends who, though nearing thirty, are still having trouble adjusting to the adult life (read: responsibility). When they learn that another friend of theirs from high school, Billy, has died, they reconvene in their hometown and pour over an old hope chest of their childhood wishes and desires. In the chest, they find a treasure map that Billy had drawn up and decide to embark on one last crazy adventure together looking for the treasure before truly settling down. Once into the Oregon wilderness, the three promptly get lost and then cross paths with two backwoods pot growers who want to kill them. Without a Paddle is not an original movie. Its plot points do nothing but bring to mind other and better movies including, among others, The Goonies, Nothing But Trouble, Return of the Jedi (though, in all fairness, the characters do mention this), Deliverance, Patch Adams and The Great Outdoors. Especially The Great Outdoors. Like so many other modern comedies, Without a Paddle chooses to sacrifice some of its humor in order include more melodramatic scenes of its characters ‘learning’. This is a distinct shame because the film’s smaller scenes were surprisingly amusing. Watching Lillard interact with his girlfriend was one of the few distinct joys Without a Paddle provided. "I’m tired of playing the part of nagging girlfriend," Lillard’s beau sighs. "Would you prefer the part of nagging wife?" Lillard says, effectively creating one of the worst marriage proposals ever. Unfortunately, most of these scenes came in the Without a Paddle’s first twenty minutes and after this time period the movie very quickly loses steam. No matter how you cut it, it’s hard to make a classic film out of a script this porous, unoriginal, homophobic and stupid. How stupid, you ask? As Without a Paddle draws to a close, Green’s character exclaims, "I’ve run out of things to be afraid of." "Not true," I thought, shaking my head at Green’s ludicrous statement, "he could be forced to sit through Without a Paddle."
chris neumer |
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