I was 12 or 13 when the first Joe Dirt came out, and as such I was the perfect age to find it screamingly funny. I saw it two or three times during its theatrical run, and I don’t regret any of it. My friends and I still quote lines from it to this day. So it brings me no pleasure to tell you that Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser is fucking awful. This is bad, guys. I’m mad at myself for watching it for free. No one, save for maybe David Spade, wanted this movie, and it’s both surprising and disappointing to see the cast peppered with returning actors like Brittany Daniel and Christopher Walken, who must have had better things to do.
It’s not just that this movie isn’t funny (but don’t get me wrong, it really, really isn’t). It’s that – and this is something I never thought I’d type – Joe Dirt 2 is confusing. The story is hard to follow, and even the characters change from scene to scene. There are two framing devices. Two! The first is Xander Kelly (a returning Dennis Miller, too good for SNL 40 but not too good for this) relaying the story of Joe Dirt to two yokels. Why he’s hanging out with them in front of a gas station is never explained. Oh wait, I forgot to mention: Xander isn’t telling the story of Joe Dirt, he’s telling the story of Joe Dirt telling the story of Joe Dirt. When we first meet the titular beautiful loser (seriously, terrible, unnecessary subtitle), the camera does this slow pan around his giant wig until we finally see Spade’s face looking pensively into the distance. This film thinks that Joe Dirt is a much more iconic character than he is. And why is the wig different? At the end of Joe Dirt, he had gotten some new goofy dreadlock wig, and now he’s back to the mullet. This is never explained. Beautiful Loser violates the Joe Dirt canon.
Joe is relaying his story to a woman on a bus stop, because Forrest Gump jokes are timely in 2015 (ditto for the film’s clumsy nods to Cast Away, Silence of the Lambs, and It’s a Wonderful Life). In fact, this whole film thinks it’s a Southern-fried version of Gump, with one major addition: time travel. A tornado sends Joe back to 1965, where his trailer lands on a motorcycle gang leader. He’s given the leader’s boots and power. So add The Wizard of Oz to JD2‘s ever-growing list of framing devices and shitty references. Time travel doesn’t seem to concern Joe – or, indeed, anyone he meets – all that much.
I’m not going to bother with rote recitation of the plot, because honestly I don’t think I could. I’m going to list a series of things that happen, for which I will provide no context. Hopefully this will give you some idea of how stupid this movie is.
- A redneck played by Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath makes a reference to The Wire
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Supermodel Charlotte McKinney has a cameo as a sexy logger, who exists only to fart on Joe’s face repeatedly
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Joe’s daughters – all rednecks too – tell him to “get cash like Kanye” and “treat us like North.” How much do you think Joe Dirt really knows about North West?
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Mark McGrath gets jerked off by pretty much his entire family
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Kids in the 1960s dress like they’re in the 1950s
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A lot of people call their penis their “thingy”
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Joe’s organs get harvested, and he’s stranded on a desert island, which turns out to be a beach in Florida, for 12 years
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The narrative stops dead in its tracks so Joe can hang out with the young future members of Lynyrd Skynyrd
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Joe’s distended testicles get sucked into an airplane toilet (Clippers player Barron Davis has a weird cameo as Joe’s doctor)
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Joe talks to himself almost the entire film, usually in an expository manner. How do we know he got new clothes? Why, just listen to him say “New J.D. clothes for twenty-seven cents!” Also, even he can never decide how to pronounce his last name, “Dirt” or “Dirte”
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Joe has a dream about Kicking Wing (a returning Adam Beach), who’s now a drug dealer selling exclusively aspirin and weed. Joe then tells him to sell harder drugs. Not kidding
Guys, I hated this movie. Hated every wretched minute of its 106-minute run time. I kept a tally of how many times I laughed: eight. Eight times. That’s one laugh every 13.25 minutes. Not a great batting average, but what do you expect from Fred Wolf, who wrote both Grown Ups films and directed Strange Wilderness? Of course, the film ends with Joe becoming rich, in a surely unintentional visual metaphor for all Happy Madison productions these days: we waste an hour and a half of our lives watching this crap, and the man who makes it walks away with a ton of money.
The only silver lining of Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser (GOD, whose idea was that subtitle??) is that Spade’s performance is so tired and joyless that you get the impression that if someone were to give him a role like Adam Sandler’s in Punch-Drunk Love, he could really knock it out of the park. You know you’ve made a truly classic comedy when the best part about it is how sad your lead seems.
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