Joe La Crasse

I braced myself for yet another film with low grade humour, plenty of bodily function jokes and not enough plot to go around.

Well, 'Joe Dirt' has all that and more... but surprisingly it turned out to be not half bad.

Perhaps the day of the preview caught me in a particularly good mood, because this story of a white trash loser searching for his parents who left him for dead at the Grand Canyon when he was eight was relatively enjoyable entertainment.

The movie is told primarily in flashback; Joe stumbles into the studio of a radio disc jockey who coaxes out of him his incredible life story. In the process Joe Dirt becomes a media darling as his story of woe and misfortune is heard by an ever sympathetic audience.

This is another movie which relies on the gross and disgusting to get its laughs; dogs balls stuck to the front porch, being covered in excrement, blowing up atom bombs, consumed by alligators and much much more!

The movie works for the most part because of David Spade's affable loser Joe Dirt. He plays a character that is not a 100 miles away from his 'Just Shoot Me' personna - a loveable idiot. He goes through life having all these setbacks - but he still maintains his positive outlook.

The movie does lag a bit at the three quarters mark, but this is a minor quibble for a film that does what is sets out to with a lot more style than its lamentable cousins.

A whole lotta fun

6 out of 10.

Joe Dirt is simply one of those underappreciated comedies. Having reacquainted myself with it recently (and repeatedly) after having not seen it in almost two years, I myself am beginning to realize that. Not only is it thoroughly funny, it is entertaining and fast paced. David Spade plays Joe Dirt, a kind, well meaning radio-station janitor with an unusual hairdo (mullet!) and extremely bad-luck. He shares his life-story with the listeners of the radio station, which mainly focuses around his never-ending search for his parents (who ditched him on a family trip to the Grand Canyon) and his unrecognized love for hometown hottie Brandy. Joe meets many unusual people along the way, has many misadventures, and as if you couldn't guess, sets himself up for many disgusting and painful situations. The humor is pretty low-brow, but who cares? The movie is funny and that's the bottom line. What I like about this movie is that I can just turn it on and let go. The movie is so well-made for a simple comedy. Spade wrote the script himself, and you can tell he took his time. Every event in the movie happens for a reason and alludes to something that will occur later down the road. Also, Joe Dirt is Spade's first likeable character. You actually feel for this doofus. Even though he looks like white-trash, he is still a good person. Which of course, leads to this movie's moral: Good things come to good people. Or as Joe would say "Life's a garden, dig it!" or "You can't have 'no' in your heart!" Christopher Walken has a hilarious bit as Dirt's co-janitor at an elementary school that has been placed in the witness protection program and Kid Rock plays Joe's bully perfectly (I love the part where he reads the note just like those guys in high school who couldn't read past 2nd grade reading level). But Spade is the real star here. Too bad this character/movie never took off. I seriously love this movie. It is consistently hilarious, has dozens of quoteable lines (stuff that you say to people in your daily routine) and has an overall feel good vibe to it. I don't know how anyone can trash this movie. For one thing, it's an Adam Sandler production, you know what type of humor you're in for. And secondly: The movie is called 'Joe Dirt!' There are no pretensions here, folks. I wish there were more movies like this out there. And although not everyone appreciates it, I am glad that I at least have this movie and can watch it a million times if I want to. Joe Dirt, you're my hero.

10/10

I'm giving this film 7 out of 10 on the fact that it has made me laugh and laugh again. I have films like the Godfather, Scarface, Shawshank Redemption and others in my DVD collection but I can tell you I have watched this film more than any of those. As others have said this film does what it sets out to do, make you laugh, and that it does and then some.

Its stupidity is great and the abuse that Joe (David Spade) receives is just fantastic. If you like watching a lovable loser get abused then this is the movie for you. Lots of laughs and memorable sayings, its a classic, 'Life a garden, dig it' and 'you can't have no in your heart' all coming from a white trash loser with a mullet who announces on the radio that he was 'jerkin his gherkin'makes for a laughfest. Highly recommended but don't expect to use your brain, juvenile amusement all the way. And Brittany Daniels as Joe love interest 'Brandy' is incredibly hot.

I'm no huge fan of David Spade and I tend to find the whole ex-SNL-star feature film genre lame and unfunny, but I happened to catch JOE DIRT while flipping through the channels yesterday afternoon and was intrigued enough to watch. And oddly enough I stayed intrigued for the next 90 minutes. The humor was crude, but rarely so much so as to turn me off, and the cast was very good (sure Dennis Miller was obnoxious, but isn't that his shtick?) but what surprised me the most was how caught up in the story I became. Sure it's farcical and impossible to take seriously, but for some reason I couldn't turn it off --- I kept hanging in there to see what would happen next. Even the slightly lame-ass ending didn't ruin things for me. I'd have to say JOE DIRT beats the crap out of similar, more favorably received movies like TOMMY BOY (which I found simply unbearable). Give it a chance.

I just thought that it was amusing reading the reviews all the way from 2001 to the present. This movie received almost entirely negative reviews when it first came out, but now there is nothing but positive reviews.

It seems that most people that saw this when it first came out were expecting something closer to Tommyboy or Blacksheep, with David Spade portraying a sarcastic sidekick with little more to offer than the occasional zinger. Instead we have a great tale of an average Joe that makes keeps a positive attitude even though he is constantly thrown into hilarious (for us) situations.

Whats the deal? It's a great film, maybe it was ahead of its time.