Joe Dirt

I braced myself for yet another film with low grade humour, plenty of bodily function jokes and not enough plot to go around.

Well, 'Joe Dirt' has all that and more... but surprisingly it turned out to be not half bad.

Perhaps the day of the preview caught me in a particularly good mood, because this story of a white trash loser searching for his parents who left him for dead at the Grand Canyon when he was eight was relatively enjoyable entertainment.

The movie is told primarily in flashback; Joe stumbles into the studio of a radio disc jockey who coaxes out of him his incredible life story. In the process Joe Dirt becomes a media darling as his story of woe and misfortune is heard by an ever sympathetic audience.

This is another movie which relies on the gross and disgusting to get its laughs; dogs balls stuck to the front porch, being covered in excrement, blowing up atom bombs, consumed by alligators and much much more!

The movie works for the most part because of David Spade's affable loser Joe Dirt. He plays a character that is not a 100 miles away from his 'Just Shoot Me' personna - a loveable idiot. He goes through life having all these setbacks - but he still maintains his positive outlook.

The movie does lag a bit at the three quarters mark, but this is a minor quibble for a film that does what is sets out to with a lot more style than its lamentable cousins.

A whole lotta fun

6 out of 10.

I'm no huge fan of David Spade and I tend to find the whole ex-SNL-star feature film genre lame and unfunny, but I happened to catch JOE DIRT while flipping through the channels yesterday afternoon and was intrigued enough to watch. And oddly enough I stayed intrigued for the next 90 minutes. The humor was crude, but rarely so much so as to turn me off, and the cast was very good (sure Dennis Miller was obnoxious, but isn't that his shtick?) but what surprised me the most was how caught up in the story I became. Sure it's farcical and impossible to take seriously, but for some reason I couldn't turn it off --- I kept hanging in there to see what would happen next. Even the slightly lame-ass ending didn't ruin things for me. I'd have to say JOE DIRT beats the crap out of similar, more favorably received movies like TOMMY BOY (which I found simply unbearable). Give it a chance.

Yeah, this movie took a trashing from the critics, but what would you expect from a movie produced by Adam Sandler? I had a blast. Joe Dirt had a rocking soundtrack, I likeable lead character that you really want to beat up, a rockin' soundtrack, funny dialogue and situations, and the usual slew of Sandler humor; fart jokes, humping dogs, etc.

Even though, about a half-dozen of these movies come out a year, Joe Dirt stuck in my mind mostly because of its hilarious premise. Dennis Miller also shined as the Howard Stern-like DJ who rips into Joe every chance he gets through out the movie, with insuluts like, "you are exquisitely pathetic" and such.

All in all, I really enjoyed. Movies like this aren't aiming for Oscars. They're just to make you laugh, which this one does. Kid Rock also has a funny cameo as Robby, the bully who, like everyone else in the film, loves giving Joe a hard time.

I just thought that it was amusing reading the reviews all the way from 2001 to the present. This movie received almost entirely negative reviews when it first came out, but now there is nothing but positive reviews.

It seems that most people that saw this when it first came out were expecting something closer to Tommyboy or Blacksheep, with David Spade portraying a sarcastic sidekick with little more to offer than the occasional zinger. Instead we have a great tale of an average Joe that makes keeps a positive attitude even though he is constantly thrown into hilarious (for us) situations.

Whats the deal? It's a great film, maybe it was ahead of its time.

As a young boy, Joe [David Spade] got seperated from his parents [Caroline Aaron and Fred Ward]. Ever since then he's spent his life on a journey to find them. On his journey he meets a nice girl named Brandy [Brittany Daniel], a Fireworks salesman named Kicking Wing [Adam Beach], and a friendly janitor named Clem [Christopher Walken]. David Spade is great in this hilarious adventure/comedy full of crude humor. It also has a fantastic soundtrack featuring classic songs from Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, The Doobie Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eddie Money, Joe Walsh, and more!