With all the cheap, braindead GenY comedies that have come along in the past few years, you’d think they’re as easy to make as instant macaroni and cheese. And you’d be right. Just take a few tattoos, cleavage, a bare midriff or two, and some Offspring, mix together in a two-qt. microwave-safe jeep, and the script practically writes itself as long as the intelligence level you’re aiming for is somewhere between mulch and Marshall Mathers.
Why is this one an improvement? Because it’s the first movie from a director (Danny Leiner) who’s done episodes of several interesting television shows (including “Freaks and Geeks,” “Strangers with Candy,” and “Sports Night”), and was written by a story editor (Philip Stark) for “That 70s Show.” Ah-ha – if someone actually writes and directs these things, they go a lot better.
After a curiouser and curiouser opening credit sequence featuring cheekbone go-go vixens, ostriches, spiral galaxies with spinning pulsars, an animated dancing kitty-kat, and something that looks like an electric volleyball, Dude… jumps right into a 24-hour period in the lives of two layabout stoners, Jesse (Ashton Kutcher, from “T70sS”) and Chester (American Pie’s Seann William Scott). They wake up to an unhappy phone message from their non-identical twin girlfriends Wanda (Jennifer Garner, from “Felicity”) and Wilma (neo-Ringwaldish Marla Sokoloff, from Whatever It Takes) about trashing the girls’ house the night before. Heading out the door of their pizza-decorated home to make amends, they discover their ride, along with the last twelve hours of memory, is missing.
What follows is a quest that would have made Tolkien happy had he been raised in 1980s Malibu rather than the Victorian/Edwardian UK. Trying to reconstruct the lost evening, Jesse and Chester encounter a transsexual stripper demanding $200,000, hordes of uncharacteristically friendly airbrushed young women, a Yoda-speaking guru, a dope-smoking dog, nerdy UFO cult members dressed in bubble wrap, swarthy detectives, pickup-driving muscleheads, uncharacteristically friendly beat cops, troublesome Chinese takeout, belligerent ostriches, Brent “Data” Spiner doing a merciless French accent, and two sets of feuding sexually-stereotyped aliens. It all has to do with something called the continuum transfunctioner, “a mysterious and powerful device whose mystery is exceeded only by its power” which is “all that stands between the universe and completely violent destruction.”
Silly, but it’s inspired silly, and it works…mostly. Again, we’re not talking Woody Allen here, but Dude… features less crude humor (it’s rated PG-13) and more raw energy than most of its contemporaries; think, Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Weird Science. Kutcher and Scott have some neat comedic chemistry going, and with Leiner’s guidance get the most out of the material; a simple “Who’s On First” bit about unexpected tattoos shows that maybe there’s some mileage to be gotten from dermal ink after all. And I think I’ll go have some bubble-wrap pants made up for the next time I’m feeling depressed. B-