DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?

Directed by Danny Leiner. 'Starring' Ashton Kutcher, Sean William Scott, Jennifer Garner, Maria Sokoloff

Given the recent avalanche of brain-dead teen-Yank movies, all apparently striving to out-dumb whichever one came before, it was only a matter of time before we hit the rock bottom of the shit-pit. Dude, Where's My Car is the definitive, ultimate nadir, and is unlikely to be rivalled any time in the near future. Retarded enough to make Martin Lawrence's Big Momma's House resemble the most challenging Tarkovsky, Dude drags the audience down into an entertainment-free black hole for 83 unrelenting minutes of moronic muck, which seem to take twice as long.

It's about two 'party-hearty dudes' (their phrase) who wake up after a drunken 'zany' night to discover that they have forgotten where they parked their car, and indeed, forgotten everything else. This proves problematic for our inseparable dimwitted duo, since they're congenitally incapable of walking more than three paces on foot, as Yanks generally are. Worse still, the lost car contains a suitcase full of money, left in their care by a menacing transexual lap-dancer. They've also unwittingly taken possession of a potentially universe-destroying continuum transfunctioner (don't ask).

Soon the pair find themselves pursued by a bubblewrap-suited, alien-obsessed cult, as well as wet T-shirted breakdancing strippers, cat-suited space sluts and 'totally gay nordic dudes' - much to the annoyance of the lads' twin girlfriends. Cue a bombardment of sub-moronic exchanges, very liberally peppered with the words 'sucky', 'dude' and 'sweet' - meanwhile, the lads employ euphemisms for female mammaries which Sam Snort would find beneath contempt ('hoo-hoos', anyone?)

Dude Where's My Car appears to harbour delusions of being a smuttier variation on the Bill & Ted series, but lacks any of the latter's charm or comic value. The gags on offer - dogs that own bongs, dogs that piss (how we laughed!!), blind kids using their disability as an excuse to grope passing females, and sixty-foot-tall sluts (it makes it easier to look up their skirts) - are so listlessly and ineffectually rendered that even laughs of the so-bad-it's-great variety are completely out of the question.

We have become quite adept recently at managing to enjoy very bad movies to the hilt, but Dude Where's My Car is truly insufferable. On the plus side, it might be the final nail in the genre's coffin. Maybe.