Comedy always has rewarded those willing to lay it out there, pull out all the stops, risk all and make themselves look incredibly stupid.
But there’s an utterly fearless streak running through comic movies these days. Comics, from Sacha “Borat” Baron Cohen to the “Jackass” gang, are taking one for the team, and for low, low laughs.
“Reno 911,” the Comedy Central TV show, becomes “Reno 911!: Miami” in a movie that positions the troupe who star in it somewhere between “Jackass” and “Cops.”
There is no humiliation they won’t put themselves through to score a laugh. Too-revealing swimsuits on swimsuit-impaired bodies, inept demonstrations of the proctologist’s tools of the trade, sexual encounters of the most embarrassing kind – it’s an R-rated version of the TV show, as if that’s a good thing.
It’s not quite all for naught. “Reno” does manage a titter here and a giggle there. But it’s a cheap, dumb, obvious movie.
Thomas Lennon is Lt. Dangle, the aptly named, slightly closeted officer in charge of a team of eight Reno, Nev., sheriff’s deputies.
He’s introduced shorts to his uniform that only a gay Australian football player could love.
His officers include the clueless Cherisa (Mary Birdsong), who pines for him, the in-denial lesbian Trudy (Kerri Kenney- Silver), the drawling rube Travis Junior (played by co-writer/director Robert Ben Garant), the zaftig tart Clementine (Wendi McLendon-Covey), Garcia (Carlos Alazraqui), Jones (Cedric Yarbrough), and the outrageous Raineesha (Niecy Nash), a woman who should never hit the beach in a T-back. But she does.
They go to a cop convention in Miami, are dissed and denied entrance, but when all the cops there are infected by a bio- agent, Team Reno takes to the streets to protect and serve.
Or to party and score. And get tattoos.
Politically incorrect in the extreme, with mincing sissies and stereotypical black movie “types,” they’d get away with it all if they were funnier. The TV show always has seemed more “local access” than network- ready. Cops, followed by a camera crew on their job as they doze off behind the wheel, flee real emergencies, and try (or try not to) hook up. I get it.
The movie takes time to sic the crew on an errant chicken crossing a road (gunfire is involved), spills blood (a weed- whacker torture), travels to the topless beach to deal with a dead whale, and tries to break up Miami rap impresario Suge Knight’s birthday party.
Cameos by Danny DeVito (his company produced the film), The Rock, Paul Reubens, and Paul Rudd, playing a drug kingpin, don’t help. Not enough, anyway.
At least it’s as brief as those shorts Dangle paints on himself every day. Seventy-five minutes? That’s admitting you don’t have enough ideas for a movie.
“Reno 911!: Miami”
R for sexual content, nudity, crude humor, language and drug use|1 hour, 15 minutes|COMEDY|Directed by Robert Ben Garant; starring Thomas Lennon, Mary Birdsong, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Niecy Nash, Cedric Yarbrough, Carlos Alazraqui, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Paul Rudd|Opens today at area theaters.
