Daltry Calhoun

If Evil Nazi Scientists had turned their attentions to comedy instead of internal medicine and the occult, they might have produced something like Daltry Calhoun. An overwhelmingly awful attempt to hybrid a bad redneck joke with a bad after-school special, writer/director Katrina Holden Bronson's film tries to garner sympathy for small-town yokels while simultaneously portraying everyone born south of the Mason-Dixon line as a drunk, impoverished rube. In that order.

What was Bronson's overall worst call in preparing to direct this film?

(1) Attempting to pass Johnny Knoxville as a serious, and sincere, leading man
(2) Employing constant voice-over narration by a sassy, precocious 14 year old girl with a thick Southern drawl
(3) Including the maximum number of cliched stock characters as humanly possible, including the beautiful dying girl, the estranged father making up for lost time, the hunky Aussie with a manic streak and the evil, shrewish stepmother
(4) Featuring a non-ironic subplot in which a retard learns to read "Charlotte's Web"
(5) Making a film out of her original screenplay, "Daltry Calhoun"
(6) All of the above



Seriously, this entire project was doomed from the get-go. It's just a bad idea for a movie, a bad idea that is then executed with a bare minimum of taste and sophistication. Somehow, Quentin Tarantino was talked into taking an executive producer credit on this shitkicker. My advice to him is to do what the Weinstein Brothers did when they split with Miramax - get yourself and your reputation as far away from Daltry Calhoun as possible.

As I said, the problems here are conceptual. The story just isn't captivating - Daltry (Johnny Knoxville), an unemployable freeloader, leaves his young wife (Elizabeth Banks) and baby girl behind with an ornery family relative (Beth Grant). 14 years later, he's become the wealthy owner and chief executive for Calhoun Industries, a large supplier of sod to the nation's golf courses. And that's when his ex-wife May and now-adolescent daughter June (the aforementioned sassy Sophie Traub) come to stay with him.

It's a touch familiar, and Bronson's writing style is a bit too cute and folksy for my tastes, but as a bare-bones description, I'll grant it doesn't sound that awful. But Bronson makes a few key errors early on. The story has little to no forward momentum. Once we're introduced to the grown-up May and June (har!), and they move in with Daltry, the movie essentially screeches to a halt. Bronson complicates the situation - we find out that Daltry's business is failing and that May has been diagnosed with Movie Wasting-Away and Dying Tragically Disease - but there's not really any conflict to propel the action.

Even though Daltry seemingly abandoned his family without word over a decade before, no one's really mad at him. And it's clear that he sincerely wants to repair his relationships with his wife and daughter. It's almost like Bronson's afraid of conflict, doesn't want her character's to do anything mean to one another, or even to argue. So everyone kind of floats along aimlessly for the film's initial hour.

Seriously. June keeps telling us in the narration that a story is somehow progressing, but all we see are characters bumping into one another and having shallow conversations or engaging in dumb redneck dialogue that's supposed to be funny but isn't. In one scene, she actually says in the voice-over, "Daltry kept working on getting Calhoun Industries back on track" without elaborating any further.

Really? How's he doing that? A new marketing campaign? Working on a new strain of grass? ANYTHING AT ALL? Isn't he supposed to be the main character in this movie?

There are a lot of these kinds of filler scenes, just bad joke after bad joke about how the people of Ducktown (yes, that's the name of the town in the movie) are pathetic or ignorant. Juliette Lewis, who seems to inspire directors to write demeaning roles, has an embarrassing role as a goofy sex bomb. (A scene in which she tries to seduce Daltry while wearing lingerie atop a motorcycle is among the most humiliating for any actress in any 2005 film.)

The movie just limps through these sorts of lame set-ups, that is when it's not lamely attempting to elicit tears via overheated melodrama. I wanted to spare his reputation, because I'm a fan, but I couldn't write a full review of Daltry Calhoun without mentioning its most egregious, insanely ill-conceived subplot. "Saturday Night Live" veteran, Anchorman co-star and partner to The Naked Trucker, Mr. David Koechner, completely degrades himself in a ridiculous supporting role as the illiterate, mentally disabled Doyle Earl. You think the movie is going to play Doyle Earl for laughs, which would be tasteless and crude but at least would make some sort of sense. But, no. Bronson actually wants to play up the scenes of June teaching Doyle to read for pathos. She thinks Koechner practicing his Phonics in his "dumb redneck" accent is dramatically satisfying.

Do I need to say anything more than that? This movie features a story about a precocious 14 year old girl from the South teaching a Tennessee village idiot to read "Charlotte's Web." Don't watch this movie. It's a horrible waste of time.