KINGPIN (59)

Directed by: Peter and Bobby Farrelly

Starring: Woody Harrelson, Bill Murray, Randy Quaid, Vanessa Angel

The Pitch: A washed-up bowling champ thinks he can make a winner out of an Amish innocent with a mean left arm.

Theo Sez: Proof that "from the makers of DUMB AND DUMBER" needn't necessarily be the seven most terrifying words in motion pictures : a shambling comedy that's undoubtedly tasteless (could I live without ever watching another vomit joke? uh, I think so) but also loose, offbeat, kind of likeable - even, amazingly, almost touching. Not that it's consistently hilarious - as in D + D, a lot of the film feels like padding ; these directors have little time for pacing, and a minimal sense of style. What they do have is an irreverent sensibility, out to puncture the Hollywood-American facade of glossy perfection, whether through jokes about bad hair and embarrassingly useless artificial hands or through the contrast between the scuzzy losers who populate the underbelly of society and the slick - if slimy - winners who know how to work the System. In those respective roles Harrelson and (especially) Murray go well beyond the call of duty, culminating in a winner-take-all bowling game, played off a couple of insufferable commentators, that manages both to make you laugh and want to jump out of your seat in indignation : when victorious Murray tosses his hapless (and handless) opponent's artificial limb into the crowd, and the commentator laughs indulgently that "some lucky fan just got a nice souvenir", our mindless worship of No. 1 never seemed crueller (or funnier). For all its flaws, and general second-handedness, it almost makes you wonder if the diarrhea jokes in D+D couldn't perhaps have been meant as a sly comment on America's stifling use of arbitrary Good Taste as a repressive weapon of socio-political control. Almost.