Dude, Where's My Car?

I didn't realise before I sat down to watch Dude, Where's My Car? all of the similarities I would be able to draw between it and old 90s movies such as Bill and Ted and Wayne's World.

Part of me can't believe how long it's taken for me to see this movie. It's one of those where you've probably heard all of the major quotes from it if you've never seen it before. The fact that it's got "dude" in the title sort of gives away the theme - so if you sit down to watch the movie and complain afterwards that you had no idea that it was going to be an hour and a half of pointless jokes about blow jobs and weed - then you really can't say you didn't have fair warning.

Featuring Ashton Kutcher (That 70s Show, The Butterfly Effect) as Jesse and Sean William Scott (American Pie, Role Models) as Chester, Dude tells an extremely bizarre tale of two stoners trying to remember what they did the night before. There are parallels, plot wise, between this film and the more recent The Hangover - though the latter of these was better written and executed. Then again, Dude doesn't try very hard - most of the gags are very simple, their targeted audience is predominantly males twixt the ages of 12 and 25 - and it doesn't try too hard to be clever. Problem is, this means that unlike The Hangover, which could appeal to a much wider audience, Dude only works on one level - and unlike Waynes World and Bill and Ted, doesn't win any prizes for originality or glean any bonuses for nostalgia.

In essence, the plot circles around two young men, unsurprisingly, looking for a lost car with no memory of how they lost it in the first place. After run ins with some surprising characters and the plot taking a seemingly pointless turn into light science fiction - you get to the end of the movie really wondering what on earth the point was. There are only a couple of really good quotables - and though Scott and Kutcher do a valiant job in maintaining the good natured idiocy that Keanu Reeves and Mike Myers brought to their similar characters, these good points are not enough to make up for the weaknesses in the script and the fact that the movie doesn't quite work as either a sci fi comedy like Bill & Ted, or as a gross out comedy such as American Pie.

A fairly poor 2 stars out of 5, I'm afraid.
Bogus.
**