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By CHRIS GLADDEN SPECIAL TO
It's a smirking, high-concept, low-laugh comedy that mistakes condescension for cleverness. David Spade stars and also concocted the script with writer Fred Wolf. Both are "Saturday Night Live" veterans. What may have worked as a three-minute, late-night skit is stretched into a one hour and 40 minutes movie that seems longer. Spade, Wolf and director Dennie Gordon somehow figured that identifying and ridiculing a specific cultural stereotype and creating a funny, smart movie is the same thing. Spade plays Joe Dirt, a dim-witted young yahoo who worships muscle cars and Dixie and arena rock from the 1970s and '80s. The movie's soundtrack might show up on late-night TV as a double CD special: Music to crush beer cans against your forehead to. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foghat, The Marshall Tucker Band, Cheap Trick, Def Leppard, Van Halen, AC-DC, Bob Seger, Eddie Money. The boys are back in town. Joe's most identifying feature is his mullet hairdo. More confident movie makers would show the hair and let it go. These guys have to explain it as some kind of wig that grew into Joe's head because of a birth defect. Most of the movie's like that: bad jokes mostly aimed at blue-collar America, pounded home again and again. Joe is a janitor who wanders into the studio of a radio shock jock of the Howard Stern variety. Dennis Miller plays the smug announcer, and he finds fresh sport in Joe, who reveals his life story on the air. He was abandoned by his parents at the Grand Canyon and has since been searching for them. He wanders into the clutches of a serial killer, the heart of a nubile country girl (Brittany Daniel), the bedroom of someone who might be his sister and the possession of odd objects that have to do with body functions. The humor is relentlessly crude and - worse - almost never funny. Compounding the problem is Spade's trademark delivery, a cross between precious and pitiful. It doesn't fit here. Fellow "SNL" vets Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, the dim denizens of "Wayne's World," knew the difference between laughing with people and laughing at them. It's a lesson Spade and his cohorts haven't learned.
Joe Dirt NO STARS A Columbia picture at Salem Valley 8, Carmike 10 and Valley View Grande 16. An hour and 40 minutes. Rated PG-13 for bathroom and sexual humor and language.
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