MEET THE DEEDLES (Disney) Starring: Paul Walker, Steve Van Wormer, A.J. Langer, John Ashton, Dennis Hopper. Screenplay: Jim Herzfeld. Producers: Dale Pollock and Aaron Meyerson. Director: Steve Boyum. MPAA Rating: PG (mild profanity, adult humor) Running Time: 90 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Walt Disney spent over thirty years turning the Disney name into the gold standard for charming family entertainment. In only a handful of months, the clown princes currently ruling the Magic Kingdom appear to have made it their mission to make the name an indicator of pure garbage. The annual animated feature aside, Uncle Walt's factory has taken to churning out insulting, embarrassing live-action features which stink like the flatulence they so often feature: 101 DALMATIANS, THAT DARN CAT, ROCKET MAN, MR. MAGOO, KRIPPENDORF'S TRIBE and now MEET THE DEEDLES.
The story this time revolves around a pair of ne'er-do-well teenage brothers, Phil (Paul Walker) and Stew Deedle (Steve Van Wormer), who spend all their time surfing and slacking in Hawaii because their Dad is filthy rich. When Pa Deedle (Eric Braeden) finally grows tired of his layabout sons, he sends them off to Wyoming for a character-building camp experience. A few misadventures and cases of mistaken identity later, the young Deedles are rangers-in-training at Yellowstone National Park, charged with ridding the park of a prairie dog infestation threatening to undermine -- literally -- the Billionth Birthday Celebration for Old Faithful.
Predictably, a bunch of tenuously connected action-slapstick sequences ensue. Even more predictably, those action-slapstick sequences include a dose of content entirely inappropriate for the target audience. At best, we're talking about taking the toilet humor in the creative direction of incontinent pigeons bombarding the Deedles' stuffy-but-ultimately-sympathetic antagonist Chief Ranger Pine (played by career stuffy-but-ultimately-sympathetic antagonist John Ashton). At worst, we're talking about the omnipresent smack-in-the-groin shot. I'm sure MEET THE DEEDLES is going to have plenty of pre-teenagers in hysterics. It's just depressing to watch the same Disney which used to bring kids goofy, harmless fare like THE LOVE BUG and THE MILLION DOLLAR DUCK resorting to such blantant pandering.
An important programming note at this point: in no way do I consider myself "above" low humor. In Mel Brooks' HIGH ANXIETY, a similar barrage of pigeon excrement during his parody of THE BIRDS still makes me guffaw. The problem with films like MEET THE DEEDLES is that they trot out scatological gags with a weary inevitability, as though it wouldn't really be a kids' film unless someone let one rip. All of which makes it even more puzzling when scripter Jim Herzfeld tosses in a reference to "suicide doctor" Jack Kervorkian, which of course would be familiar to every headline-hungry middle-schooler. If that's Herzfeld's idea of throwing a bone to the parents forced to squirm through this mess with their kids, perhaps a better one might have been making the slang-spewing Deedles a bit more than one-joke copies of Bill and Ted. Or giving Dennis Hopper (as the vengeance-seeking former ranger running the prairie dog scheme) a sense of irony about his own performance. Or providing a way to explain to young girls why a competent female ranger (A.J. Langer) turns to mush when an 18-year-old moron woos her with sweet nothings about how he "totally craves (her) wave."
MEET THE DEEDLES didn't have to be smart. There's a place in our multiplexes for dopey-but-innocuous family fare. The key word there would be "innocuous." If Disney execs are interested in salvaging what remains of the studio's reputation -- and its dignity -- they might stop for just one moment to think about what Uncle Walt might say. That is, what he might say after he picked his jaw up off the floor and stopped slapping the responsible parties insensible.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Deedles on empty: 1.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews