If you are one of those people who gets outraged at the idea that someone would dare to judge a movie that they haven't seen and ended up accidentally spitting so much of whatever you happened to be drinking at your computer that you short circuited it, I apologi...on second thought, if your computer doesn't work, that means that you're not even reading this so the hell with you. Hell, if you don't know that you aren't supposed to be spitting at electronic devices then you are probably a Larry the Cable Guy fan.
The fact that I can't stand Larry is Exhibit #1 in my case against Witless Protection. If you think he's funny, well, you have my pity. Some of you Larry fans may have suffered a traumatic head injury at some point and will see this movie when your caretakers bring you to the theater, help you off with your helmet and periodically wipe the drool off your face. If this is not the case for you then you really have no excuse. Larry lost me as a fan the first time I ever saw him perform on TV and heard him say something like, "First time I ever saw Rosie O'Donnell, my wiener done gone up my body and come out my butthole." There is a list of people in this world who fail to make me laugh yet have huge, passionate fanbases. These people include Tom Green, Jenny McCarthy (who's also in this movie), Dane Cook, Rush Limbaugh and, of course, Larry the Cable Guy. I just have to remind myself over and over that comedy is subjective when I see people laughing, cheering wildly and encouraging Larry to Git-R-Done when he says things like, "If you get whacked by a gay mafia, is that good or bad?"
Exhibit #2 consists of Larry's previous films. Larry was the voice of Tow Mater in Cars. That's a point in his favor. That was a wonderful movie and he was often very funny in it. Of course, that was a movie with Larry the Cable Guy in it, not a Larry the Cable Guy movie. That is not a subtle difference. Cars was a movie in which Larry supplied the voice of a supporting character and spoke dialogue that was written for him, thus making it a movie with Larry the Cable Guy in it. A Larry the Cable Guy movie is one where he's the star and had a great deal of creative input, which brings us to Health Inspector and Delta Farce. These are both movies that are so bad that the only way I could entertain myself was trying to imagine how they could have been worse. Sex with relatives or farm animals or maybe actually having to watch Larry take a crap (although there is a scene where he takes a piss in a shower) would probably have had to occur to achieve that standard. In Health Inspector he plays a stupid, incompetent health inspector who, despite the vast authority of his position, is unable to get restaurants shut down even though they are poisoning people. He gets fired from his job, partly due to what is apparently the all-powerful reach of restaurant owners but mostly because he's a moron but manages to resolve the whole, stupid situation by going undercover. In Delta Farce, he and his Blue Collar Comedy pal Bill Engvall play stupid, incompetent soldiers who crash land in Mexico and think it's Iraq. They then proceed to cause an international incident by fighting corrupt Federales and quite improbably manage to get hot Mexican girls to fall for them. The humor mainly consisted of racist and homophobic jokes with a healthy does of toilet humor mixed in. These movies are both not only bad but I'd say that their existence is almost blasphemous and that you could probably take the scripts and, given the proper incantation and alignment of the stars, use them to summon Cthulu.
Exhibit #3, my final piece of evidence, consists of the movie's trailer and IMDB profile. IMDB starts off by saying that this was written and directed by Charles Robert Carner. In his entire profile, there is only one movie that I recognized and that was his 1985 screenplay for Gymkata. This was a stupid movie about some threat to the planet that could only be solved by a combination of gymnastics and martial arts, hence the title. Everything else that Carner has ever written or directed is...well...I can't say bad since I had never seen any of them. I'm having a hard time even remembering any of them. Mostly he's done made-for TV projects like his last movie, Judas. I see that he actually thought it was a good idea to cast Tim Matheson as Pontius Pilate and, for some reason, having the guy who played Animal House's Otter condemn Jesus to death didn't garner huge ratings. So, Charles Robert Carner started off his career with a stupid movie, and proceeded from there to stupid, forgettable movies. And now he's directing Witless Protection.
The trailer's a whole different animal. In it, we see Larry playing a stupid, incompetent deputy who thinks a Russian woman he sees in a diner who is under FBI protection has been kidnapped. Because, you know, kidnappers love to bring their victims into public diners. We also get to hear a sample of the hilarious dialogue:
Russian Woman: Are you insane?
Larry: No, I'm Larry.
The trailer also shows a large number of B-list actors. Two of these include Jenny McCarthy and Eric Roberts. Jenny McCarthy is on the list I mentioned above. She got a reputation for being funny from when she hosted an MTV show where guys would laugh at what she said because she was hot. Eric Roberts, on the other hand, became famous when he played Paul Snider in the movie Star 80. The late Gene Siskel once called his performance in that one of the best pieces of acting he had ever seen. This is why I imagine he cries himself to sleep at night because, pretty much ever since then his career has been what I can only assume is some sort of experiment to see how many crappy movies he can be in before they'll stop letting him make movies.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I think I've made my case. If, after reading this, you still want to go and see Witless Protection, I just hope your caretakers make sure you don't choke on your popcorn.
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