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Dukes of Hazzard (Unrated), The (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // Unrated // July 11, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $28.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Look, you don't want to read 
some deep, critical analysis of The Dukes of Hazzard, and that works out well for me 'cause I don't want to write one. It's a hunnert six minutes of car chases and tits 'n ass, based on a TV show that's better left as a dusty, nostalgic memory.
If you really need some sort of plot summary beyond that, it goes something like this: Bo Duke and Luke Duke (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) -- two cousins who're closer'n brothers -- careen around Hazzard County, Georgia in a '69 Dodge Charger deliverin' moonshine and defilin' the local farmers' daughters. That puts 'em at odds with the local law enforcement, led by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (M.C. Gainey), who are constantly in gyuk-gyuk-hot pursuit. Rosco reports to money-grubbing county commissioner Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds), whose latest scheme is to seize a bunch of farmland and turn the backwater county into a giant strip mine. Anyway, Hogg seizes the Duke family farm and boots Uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson) outta home 'n still. The Duke boys catch wind of Hogg's plot, and it's up to them and their too-short-shorts-wearin' cousin Daisy (Jessica Simpson) to step in and save Hazzard yet again.
Yeah, some other stuff happens, but who cares? It's all an excuse to either set up a car chase or to squeeze Jessica Simpson into the tightest, skimpiest outfits that'd still slink by with a PG-13 rating. And that's the problem, really. The General Lee is the real star of the movie, and whenever the car's not on-screen, the movie grinds to a screeching halt. Most of the characters are grating, force-fed campiness takes the place of the low-rent charm of the original series, and there's not a single damn laugh in the movie. Not a smirk, not a grin, not a chuckle, not a what-the-hell-ever. I'm not some stuffy critic who frowns at anything remotely low-brow -- hell, I was
born in South Carolina and watched the Dukes religiously growing up, so...y'know...target demographic -- but The Dukes of Hazzard is aggressively un-funny, something I wouldn't have expected from a director who helmed Super Troopers and a bunch of episodes of Arrested Development.
Jessica Simpson tries to put the "tit" in "titillating", as if she has much of anything else to offer, but it takes more than cleavage and tiny shorts to be sexy. C'mon, I can't be the only straight guy in the country who finds nothing appealing about her. The only scene that comes close to deserving the "unrated" tag splattered across the cover art (although it'd land an "R" without any trouble) has a couple groups of sorority girls standing around topless for a few seconds. I mean, I'm all for boobs, but boobs-for-the-sake-of-boobs is no fun at all. Are no fun at all. Whatever. Something like half of the movie is set with Bo and Luke tearing around in the General Lee. I found myself appreciating on a purely technical level how well the stunts were pulled off, but it feels more like watching a stunt coordinator's demo reel than a movie and gets stale pretty quickly.
I'm sure a good movie could've been mined from The Dukes of Hazzard. Well, maybe not a good movie, exactly, but at least an hour and a half of mindless fun. This big-screen adaptation nails the "mindless" part but botches the rest. Not recommended.
Video: It's probably just a case of misplaced
expectations, but I was kinda underwhelmed by the 2.40:1 high-definition video. For one, the palette's often somewhat darker and more subdued than I'd have thought a breezy, mindless summer action-comedy would be. Although the image is sharp and crisp enough that there's never any doubt that I was watching The Dukes of Hazzard in HD, a decent number of shots seem to have much of the fine detail wiped away. Some stretches look spectacular, but the level of detail is inconsistent, although admittedly the differences between the most and least impressive moments aren't exactly dramatic. I'm sure a lot of this owes more to the original photography than anything directly related to the authoring of this HD DVD, which is otherwise as solid as you'd expect for a movie that's just shy of a year old.
Audio: Since the movie is pretty much one car chase after another, the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio has plenty of excuses to be bombastic. I came away a little disappointed, though; even though a fair amount of the movie is accompanied by thundering waves of bass, the surround channels really weren't as prominent as I was expecting, and it often just seemed loud instead of serving up clear, distinct, localized sounds. It's fine and all, but I was expecting to dish out more stars in the sidebar than this. Also included are a Spanish stereo dub and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Okay, so I didn't like the movie at all, but as little sense as I'm sure this makes, I kinda dug a few of the extras. Most of the featurettes are short but put together really well, and instead of just lightweight talking head interviews with the cast, they put a lot more emphasis on the nuts-'n-bolts of production, giving the crew behind the scenes some face time without ever getting droningly over-technical.
The '69 Dodge
Charger being the real star and all, it gets a couple of five minute featurettes to itself. "The General Lee Lives" focuses on bringing the iconic muscle car to the screen and shows off some of the really impressive rigs the crew assembled to snag some of the trickier shots. "How to Launch a Muscle Car 175 Feet in 4 Seconds" is...yeah, truth in advertising, and it's all about the stunt work. "Daisy Dukes: The Short, Short Shorts" spends four and a half minutes on Jessica Simpson's skimpy wardrobe, and the costume designers run through how you, the home viewer, can make your own pair of Daisy Dukes. The longest and least interesting of the featurettes is the fifteen minute "The Hazards of Dukes", which has a structure that's pretty close to your standard issue "HBO First Look" EPK, only played more tongue-in-cheek.
There are a bunch of deleted scenes that are broken out into PG-13 and unrated sections. The PG-13 set runs around twenty-five minutes, and although it's mostly a dumping ground for alternate takes and footage reiterating stuff we already know, there are a couple of lengthy additional scenes. One of 'em is a blindfolded tear through the backroads of Hazzard County, and there's also a cringe-worthy alternate ending. The unrated set is a lot shorter, consisting of just three scenes that don't even average a minute a pop. The first two are more tits at the sorority house, and the last one is actually the ending for the PG-13 cut of the movie. Why it's under the unrated footage, I have no idea. There are also separate PG-13 and unrated blooper reels 'cause I guess you're only allotted so many "fuck!"s or jokes about semen taste in a PG-13 clip. Each reel clocks in around five minutes in length.
The video for Jessica Simpson's cover of "These Boots Were Made for Walkin'" is also included along with an anamorphic widescreen trailer. A couple of Easter Eggs were hidden on the DVD, and they're tossed on as regular extras here. First up is a twenty second and change bit of a fan showing off the General Lee tattoo on his foot, and the other is a couple of minutes of the Duke boys' stunt dummies spending a night on the town in N'Awlins.
Although none of the extras are in high-definition,
the HD DVD does make use of the new 'In Movie Experience' feature. For the most part, it's kind of like a video commentary with a little picture-in-picture window that pops up periodically. Jay Chandrasekhar, Seann William Scott, and Johnny Knoxville do most of the talkin', although unlike an audio commentary, which tends to be more conversational, this mostly consists of really brief comments responding to whatever's on-screen at the moment. Turning up less frequently are behind-the-scenes footage and pop-up facts, and there's also a counter to let you know when Jessica Simpson's about to walk on-screen. To parrot something I said in another review, these in-movie experiences seem to just punctuate what's happening on-screen, unlike an audio commentary that tends to make the conversation the primary focus. I guess I just need to get used to that difference -- as it is, I kinda shift in my seat in the sometimes-sorta-lengthy gaps in the in-movie experience while I wait for the next pop-up window to zip by.
Conclusion: Change the names of some characters and put 'em in a different muscle car, and The Dukes of Hazzard wouldn't even be recognizable as an adaptation of the southern-fried TV series. It wasn't exactly a great show to begin with, but the movie's much, much worse.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from the official movie site and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD. Really, who wants to read a movie review without any pictures?
some deep, critical analysis of The Dukes of Hazzard, and that works out well for me 'cause I don't want to write one. It's a hunnert six minutes of car chases and tits 'n ass, based on a TV show that's better left as a dusty, nostalgic memory. If you really need some sort of plot summary beyond that, it goes something like this: Bo Duke and Luke Duke (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) -- two cousins who're closer'n brothers -- careen around Hazzard County, Georgia in a '69 Dodge Charger deliverin' moonshine and defilin' the local farmers' daughters. That puts 'em at odds with the local law enforcement, led by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (M.C. Gainey), who are constantly in gyuk-gyuk-hot pursuit. Rosco reports to money-grubbing county commissioner Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds), whose latest scheme is to seize a bunch of farmland and turn the backwater county into a giant strip mine. Anyway, Hogg seizes the Duke family farm and boots Uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson) outta home 'n still. The Duke boys catch wind of Hogg's plot, and it's up to them and their too-short-shorts-wearin' cousin Daisy (Jessica Simpson) to step in and save Hazzard yet again.
Yeah, some other stuff happens, but who cares? It's all an excuse to either set up a car chase or to squeeze Jessica Simpson into the tightest, skimpiest outfits that'd still slink by with a PG-13 rating. And that's the problem, really. The General Lee is the real star of the movie, and whenever the car's not on-screen, the movie grinds to a screeching halt. Most of the characters are grating, force-fed campiness takes the place of the low-rent charm of the original series, and there's not a single damn laugh in the movie. Not a smirk, not a grin, not a chuckle, not a what-the-hell-ever. I'm not some stuffy critic who frowns at anything remotely low-brow -- hell, I was
born in South Carolina and watched the Dukes religiously growing up, so...y'know...target demographic -- but The Dukes of Hazzard is aggressively un-funny, something I wouldn't have expected from a director who helmed Super Troopers and a bunch of episodes of Arrested Development. Jessica Simpson tries to put the "tit" in "titillating", as if she has much of anything else to offer, but it takes more than cleavage and tiny shorts to be sexy. C'mon, I can't be the only straight guy in the country who finds nothing appealing about her. The only scene that comes close to deserving the "unrated" tag splattered across the cover art (although it'd land an "R" without any trouble) has a couple groups of sorority girls standing around topless for a few seconds. I mean, I'm all for boobs, but boobs-for-the-sake-of-boobs is no fun at all. Are no fun at all. Whatever. Something like half of the movie is set with Bo and Luke tearing around in the General Lee. I found myself appreciating on a purely technical level how well the stunts were pulled off, but it feels more like watching a stunt coordinator's demo reel than a movie and gets stale pretty quickly.
I'm sure a good movie could've been mined from The Dukes of Hazzard. Well, maybe not a good movie, exactly, but at least an hour and a half of mindless fun. This big-screen adaptation nails the "mindless" part but botches the rest. Not recommended.
Video: It's probably just a case of misplaced
expectations, but I was kinda underwhelmed by the 2.40:1 high-definition video. For one, the palette's often somewhat darker and more subdued than I'd have thought a breezy, mindless summer action-comedy would be. Although the image is sharp and crisp enough that there's never any doubt that I was watching The Dukes of Hazzard in HD, a decent number of shots seem to have much of the fine detail wiped away. Some stretches look spectacular, but the level of detail is inconsistent, although admittedly the differences between the most and least impressive moments aren't exactly dramatic. I'm sure a lot of this owes more to the original photography than anything directly related to the authoring of this HD DVD, which is otherwise as solid as you'd expect for a movie that's just shy of a year old. Audio: Since the movie is pretty much one car chase after another, the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio has plenty of excuses to be bombastic. I came away a little disappointed, though; even though a fair amount of the movie is accompanied by thundering waves of bass, the surround channels really weren't as prominent as I was expecting, and it often just seemed loud instead of serving up clear, distinct, localized sounds. It's fine and all, but I was expecting to dish out more stars in the sidebar than this. Also included are a Spanish stereo dub and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Okay, so I didn't like the movie at all, but as little sense as I'm sure this makes, I kinda dug a few of the extras. Most of the featurettes are short but put together really well, and instead of just lightweight talking head interviews with the cast, they put a lot more emphasis on the nuts-'n-bolts of production, giving the crew behind the scenes some face time without ever getting droningly over-technical.
The '69 Dodge
Charger being the real star and all, it gets a couple of five minute featurettes to itself. "The General Lee Lives" focuses on bringing the iconic muscle car to the screen and shows off some of the really impressive rigs the crew assembled to snag some of the trickier shots. "How to Launch a Muscle Car 175 Feet in 4 Seconds" is...yeah, truth in advertising, and it's all about the stunt work. "Daisy Dukes: The Short, Short Shorts" spends four and a half minutes on Jessica Simpson's skimpy wardrobe, and the costume designers run through how you, the home viewer, can make your own pair of Daisy Dukes. The longest and least interesting of the featurettes is the fifteen minute "The Hazards of Dukes", which has a structure that's pretty close to your standard issue "HBO First Look" EPK, only played more tongue-in-cheek. There are a bunch of deleted scenes that are broken out into PG-13 and unrated sections. The PG-13 set runs around twenty-five minutes, and although it's mostly a dumping ground for alternate takes and footage reiterating stuff we already know, there are a couple of lengthy additional scenes. One of 'em is a blindfolded tear through the backroads of Hazzard County, and there's also a cringe-worthy alternate ending. The unrated set is a lot shorter, consisting of just three scenes that don't even average a minute a pop. The first two are more tits at the sorority house, and the last one is actually the ending for the PG-13 cut of the movie. Why it's under the unrated footage, I have no idea. There are also separate PG-13 and unrated blooper reels 'cause I guess you're only allotted so many "fuck!"s or jokes about semen taste in a PG-13 clip. Each reel clocks in around five minutes in length.
The video for Jessica Simpson's cover of "These Boots Were Made for Walkin'" is also included along with an anamorphic widescreen trailer. A couple of Easter Eggs were hidden on the DVD, and they're tossed on as regular extras here. First up is a twenty second and change bit of a fan showing off the General Lee tattoo on his foot, and the other is a couple of minutes of the Duke boys' stunt dummies spending a night on the town in N'Awlins.
Although none of the extras are in high-definition,
the HD DVD does make use of the new 'In Movie Experience' feature. For the most part, it's kind of like a video commentary with a little picture-in-picture window that pops up periodically. Jay Chandrasekhar, Seann William Scott, and Johnny Knoxville do most of the talkin', although unlike an audio commentary, which tends to be more conversational, this mostly consists of really brief comments responding to whatever's on-screen at the moment. Turning up less frequently are behind-the-scenes footage and pop-up facts, and there's also a counter to let you know when Jessica Simpson's about to walk on-screen. To parrot something I said in another review, these in-movie experiences seem to just punctuate what's happening on-screen, unlike an audio commentary that tends to make the conversation the primary focus. I guess I just need to get used to that difference -- as it is, I kinda shift in my seat in the sometimes-sorta-lengthy gaps in the in-movie experience while I wait for the next pop-up window to zip by. Conclusion: Change the names of some characters and put 'em in a different muscle car, and The Dukes of Hazzard wouldn't even be recognizable as an adaptation of the southern-fried TV series. It wasn't exactly a great show to begin with, but the movie's much, much worse.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from the official movie site and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD. Really, who wants to read a movie review without any pictures?
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