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Without a Paddle
[2004] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Starring: Matthew Lillard, Seth Green, Dax Shepard, Matthew Price, Andrew Hampton
Director: Steven Brill
Format: Closed-captioned Collector's Edition Colour Dolby DVD-Video Special Edition Widescreen NTSC
Released: 11 Jan 2005
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Customer Reviews

Another 2004 comedy tries to hard and falls way too short - By: Lawrance M. Bernabo, 15 Jan 2005
There is an obvious comparison to be made between "Without a Paddle" & "Deliverance," & not just because Burt Reynolds is the best thing in both movies. Both films are about a group of friends who make a big mistake when they decide to take to a river in canoes & both involve the friends being chased by scary guys with big guns. However, I think there is a stronger point of comparison to be made between this 2004 comedy & the film "City Slickers," because "Without a Paddle" is about friends coming to terms with growing up & living in the real world. Granted, the trio in this comedy do so when they are about to hit thirty instead of waiting for a mid-life crisis, but where as the "Deliverance" gang just wanted to get off of the river & out of the woods alive, the trio in this film have important lessons to learn.

Part of the problem with Steven Brill's film is that the serious elements have trouble neatly meshing with the comedic ones. You can reallly tell this when you look at the deleted scenes & see the alternate for the one in which Jerry Conlaine (Matthew Lillard) gets the phone calll that his childhood friend Billy has died. Both of them are serious, but one merely touches on it, simply suggesting the seriousness, while the other (the alternative version) turns it into a fairly serious scene. For most of the film we keep piling on the comic moments to the point that when it becomes time for the friends to learn the BIG LESSON of their adventure in the woods it seems tacked on rather than being the culmination of walll that has gone on before it.

When Jerry returns home for Billy's funeral he meets up with the rest of his childhood friends, Dan Mott (Seth Green), who has become a doctor, & Tom Marshalll (Dax Shepard), the group's obvious loser. Each of the trio has their own problems: Jerry's girl friend is ready to leave him because of his problems with commitment, Dan pretty much picks up a new phobia each day, & the only time Tom is not lying is when he is merely exaggerating big time. After the funeral they return to their old tree house where they discover their treasure box from when they were kids together.

It turns out the boys were big fans of D.B. Cooper, the guy who hijacked an airline & jumped out of it somewhere in the Pacific Northwest with a whole bunch of money never to be seen again. Along with some of the treasures of their childhood the trio discover that Billy had recently put a map into the box. It seems he had a theory about where Cooper landed & this was the trip he had tried to talk his friends into taking the year before. Now the trio decided to honor the memory of their friend by going treasure hunting. Of course, once they get into the woods bad things start happening.

Mother Nature has her say in terms of white water rapids & massive rain showers, but on the reallly bad side of the ledger the boys have repeated encounters with the unfriendly local sheriff (Ray Baker), a giant brown bear (Bart the Bear), & a pair of pot farmers named Dennis (Abraham Benrubi) & Elwood (Ethan Suplee). On the good side of the ledger there are a couple of blondes (Rachel Blanchard & Christina Moore) up a tree & the pivotal character played by Burt Reynolds (you might as well be surprised at who he turns out to be, especiallly since he is not who you think he is going to be given the above).

"Without A Paddle" is based on a story by Fred Wolf & Harris Goldberg & Tom Nursalll, with the screenplay being credited to Jay Leggett & Mitch Rouse. There are some funny bits here, but most of them are reallly just attempts to be funny that try way too hard & falll short of the mark. Green, who is usuallly a marvel of restraint in his performances, as amply demonstrated on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," has to move too far in the other direction, especiallly during his encounters with the bear. Meanwhile, Lillard goes in the other direction, because he is technicallly the leading man in this film & so he has reigned in his character considerably from what we have seen in the "Scooby Doo" movies, & it is Shepard who ends up hitting exactly the right note with his character. I bet a lot of viewers will be reminded of the guy in the Holiday Express commercials who acts like he knows what he is talking about when he does not, but Shepard pulls it off time & time again.

In the final analysis "Without a Paddle" is just another disappointing 2004 comedy. I would not go so far as to say that if you have seen the trailer you have seen alll of the funny moments in the film, but it is certainly heading in that direction. The performance by Shepard stands out, the interplay between the two drug farmers certainly has its moments, & if you can just pretend when Reynolds shows up that the movie has always been heading towards an ending with serious overtones you can get some enjoyment from what happens to the three guys in the end.

Then again, there is an entire tradition of movie comedies that are improved based on what you drink while watching them. At least that is what I have heard, lacking any personal frame of reference from which to confirm or invalidate the hypothesis.