 Most reviews for The Dukes of Hazzard are predictably scathing. "So loud, so long, so dumb," mourns Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. How dumb? Well, Jack Mathews writes in the New York Daily News: "If the person who came up with the idea of a film version of the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard were caught in a bear trap, he'd chew off his foot to get free then wonder why one leg was shorter than the other. That is to say, he might have survival skills but not much sense." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times merely dismissing it as "a lame-brained, outdated wheeze." But then, many critics observe that the original television show, which ran from 1979 to 1985, was hardly any role model. As Gene Seymour comments in Newsday: "A feather-headed, scruffy old TV show deserves nothing less than a feather-headed, scruffy movie version. And The Dukes of Hazzard meets such low expectations." A.O. Scott in the New York Times remarks that the movie serves as "the latest evidence that, for Hollywood studios at least, there can never be too much of a mediocre thing." Robert Morgenstern in the Walt Street Journal puts it this way: "The Dukes Of Hazzard turns a sow's ear into a bigger sow's ear." Chris Kaltenbach in the Baltimore Sun notes that there's not much of a script evident here and that in fact "the dominant line of dialogue" in the movie is "Yeeeeeee-haaaaaa." And Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, writing from Hazzard-land in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sums up: "It's every bit as bad as you thought it'd be. Only worse." |
