Other Titles • Joe Dirt • The Adventures of Joe Dirt
Synopses for Joe Dirt (2001)
1.
David Spade plays Joe, whose search for his family has him hittin' the road and keepin' it real with every lowlife he meets, including a sweet hottie (Brittany Daniel), a janitor (Christopher Walken), and a psychotic cannibal (Brian Thompson) with whom he has a brief interlude.
Through it all, Joe keeps on truckin'… all the way to L.A., where a shock jock DJ (Dennis Miller) targets Joe as the butt of his show. But Joe's plucky spirit encourages listeners to cheer him on and help him find a better family than the one he thought he wanted. Rock on!
(20 votes)
2.
The eponymous hero of Joe Dirt is full of "uncomplicated goodness", which is a polite way of saying he's your archetypal dim bulb trailer trash. Sporting a mullet that makes him look like a chipmunk Billy Rae Cyrus, Dirt loves Lynyrd Skynyrd, greaser burgers, Auto Trader magazine and tying fireworks to cows. He is, as LA shock DJ Zander Kelly declares, "an underachievement nexus". Nonetheless, Dirt's quest to find the parents that abandoned him when he was eight years old captures the heart of Kelly's listeners and the hapless Dirt is cheered on as his stumbles from mishap to embarrassment. Cue an endearing but not entirely successful blend of fart gags and feelgood sentimentality. Saturday Night Live comedian David Spade captures the drawling dumbness of Dirt perfectly and Kid Rock puts in a star turn as Dirt's rival for the heart of Brandy (Brittany Daniel), but there's little here that hasn't been seen before. Dirt gets covered in "poop", Dirt is nearly eaten by a crocodile, Dirt becomes an unlikely hero of the people. With a sharper script and a slightly more adventurous bent, this could have been a 21st century Wayne's World. As it is, file under "bad hair, dude".
On the DVD: As well as the usual array of outtakes, bloopers and deleted scenes, there are telling commentaries from both director Dennie Gordon and star David Spade. The latter is particularly revealing as it consists mainly of Spade saying "well, this scene used to be funny, but we had to cut this bit to get the PG-13 rating". A basic filmography for each of the main actors and the theatrical trailer rounds off the package. --Ian Watson
(14 votes)
3.
The year is 1975 and little Joe Dirt is dumpster diving at a Grand canyon tourist stop. After gorging himself on half-eaten snacks, he emerges from the garbage bin, only to find that his parents have left him. NOW, this trash-eating eight year old is going to have to raise himself.
Now grown up and working as a janitor, Joe's got a mullet hairdo, acid-washed jeans, and a dream—to find the parents that he lost, or lost him. Blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd in his souped-up muscle car, the irrepressibly optimistic Joe hits the road alone in search Of his folks.
Along the way, Joe befriends a strange but wonderful cast of characters including a high school janitor (Christopher Walken), an alligator trainer (Rosanna Arquette), the fireworks salesman "Kicking Wing" (Adam Beach), the beautiful but untouchable Brandy (Brittany Daniel), and Robby (Kid Rock), Joe's rival for her attention. Through triumph and adversity, Joe Dirt plows on.
As his wandering, misguided search takes him from one hilarious misadventure to another—from an unexpected flight in a dentist's molar- shaped hot-air balloon, to a strange interlude with a curvaceous young woman (Jaime Pressly) who might be his sister, to capture by a cannibalistic psycho—Joe finds his way to Los Angeles, where shock-jock Zander Kelly (Dennis Miller) brings Joe on his radio show for a quick on-air interview. Dirt is haplessly stuck in the '70s—the perfect target for the rapier wit of Kelly.
But as Joe starts to tell the tale of his bizarre life, and of his search for the parents who left him, listeners are surprisingly captivated by his hilarious and often touching story. Jeers turn to cheers, and an entire city starts to tune in daily to hear the adventures of Joe Dirt. It isn't long before audiences worldwide join to help this unlikely hero unearth the mystery of his family's disappearance—with startling results.
(12 votes)
4.
From the producing team of the comedy smash Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo comes a hilarious comedy that says, "Life is a garden - dig it."
He's the wrong person, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. Joe Dirt (David Spade) is a janitor with a mullet hairdo, acid-washed jeans and a dream to find the parents that he lost at the Grand Canyon when he was a belligerent, trailer park-raised eight-year-old. Now, blasting Van Halen in his jacked-up economy car, the irrepressibly optimistic Joe hits the road alone in search of his folks.
Another of those cut-and-paste comedies from Adam Sandler's production company starring one of Sandler's erstwhile Saturday Night Live colleagues, The Adventures of Joe Dirt finds the magnificently caustic David Spade emasculated by a sentimental script and shapeless, haphazard cutting. Spade plays the title character, a white-trash orphan in search of the parents who abandoned him at the Grand Canyon. The humor is supposed to come from Joe's misadventures, his redneck gullibility, and his encounters with such figures as a serial killer, a wacked-out janitor (Christopher Walken), and a lovable gal (Jamie Pressly) who may, unfortunately, turn out to be his sister. But the squishier requirements of the story, requiring the audience to feel deeply for the pain of Spade's caricature, are an irritant and force Spade to veer from the nastier stuff he does so well. With Kid Rock, Dennis Miller. --Tom Keogh
(12 votes)
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