Surfer, Dude

Rating R Formats DVD Genre comedy Starring Matthew McConaughey, Alexie Gilmore, Scott Glenn, Jeffrey Nordling, Ramon Rodriguez, Willie Nelson Directed by S.R. Bindler Publisher Anchor Bay Entertainment

“Love and waves, that’s what we need in these dark days.”

Apparently you also need pot. Huge, enormous sums of marijuana. Maybe even some LSD and Ex to go with it. Pile some Jack and a dash of absinthe, as well. This is the only cocktail I can come up with in my head through which you can find any sort of enjoyment in this film at all. I mean, it’s so blatantly a stoner film, you have to be stoned out of your mind just to enjoy it. Stoned, wasted, and probably a bit insane. Sure, the list of drugs I have added will most likely kill you (I haven’t taken any of them, so I can’t speak from experience), but if you watch this movie sober, it will kill you out of sheer boredom anyway. So, I mean, it’s like choosing between dying by fire or dying by ice. Either way, you’re going to end up dead…or at the very least with a minute remainder of a soul. But I don’t condone drug use at all, so you probably shouldn’t watch the movie. Which works out great, because I can’t condone the movie, either.

I think the movie tries to make a statement that, in these days of reality television and corporate monsters, sometimes all you need is a little bit of surfing (shirtless McConaughey included for about 99% of the time he’s in the film) and a little bit of marijuana for you to see the good in the world. Well, surfers and hippies have been trying to tell that to us for a good forty years now. We got the message with Woodstock, and every day ever since, so we really don’t need this film at all.

What’s so upsetting is that everybody on the face of the earth knows for a fact Woody Harrelson can do better work than this. Scott Glenn has gone from The Hunt For Red October and Training Day to this? Even McConaughey, who (no surprise) isn’t the BEST actor in the business, has done films like the highly underrated Frailty, likewise underrated Contact, and Amistad. He was even in Reign Of Fire opposite Christian Bale…a movie that made absolutely no sense, but was still a perfectly enjoyable action film with dragons and fire and explosives. Waves and pot? And goats? A step down to say the least.

Maybe everyone in this film just got bored and wanted to pour their emotions into a boring film. In that case, “bravo.” But you won’t get a star from me. Hell…I don’t even want to talk about the plot. If I did that, I’d have to advise you to smoke some pot, do LSD and Ex, and drink some Jack ‘n absinthe just so you can get through the bore that is the “plot.” But I cannot in good conscious do that to you. So I’m going to do the next best thing and stop this review.