Reno 911: Miami

Reno 911: Miami, the big screen adaptation of the low key Comedy Central series, is a mixed bag of hit or miss goofy gags and bawdy physical comedy. Some of the material is genuinely funny, but a lot of it is purely defined by ridiculousness. To be gross and stupid is not always the same as being funny, and the Reno team tends to confuse the two.

Thomas Lennon (actor & co-writer) stars as Lieutenant Jim Dangle, a clueless flake in tight shorts. He heads up a ragtag group of beyond stupid misfits all of whom get fortuitously cast out of a police convention just as a mysterious biohazard leaves all of Miami’s police force in quarantine.

The plot is thin (very thin), but that’s really not the point with a movie like this. It’s mostly about stringing together various unfortunate incidents in which the Reno crew prove themselves repeatedly incompetent. Occasionally there are also some truly bizarre character stories tossed onto the heap of wicked laughs, but it's mostly about 911 calls gone awry and the repeated crashing of police cars into things (especially other police cars). The formula works really well for awhile and even bounces back once or twice near the end of the film’s brief runtime, but for the most part this is an overextended movie (even at just 82 minutes). It turns out that Reno probably should have stayed in hour half hour format. By the middle of the film, so many jokes are being recycled that the entire production feels like déjà vu. It not only fails to continue momentum, but also becomes outright unfunny. There’s a threshold here at which point the writer’s just start tossing in random obscene sight gags as if vomiting prostitutes are the cure all for all comedic woes.

This will probably work well for true fans of the show, but general audiences are bound to get tired of the redundant material. The number of laughs doesn’t quite compensate for the stagnant story and extended periods absent of the unsavory cleverness that makes a premise like this tick. To justify a film, the writers would have needed to dig deeper into their big bag of dirty tricks rather than merely relocate the antics. They have the bigger budget and the freedom from censorship on their side creatively, but with only a handful of new additions to the formula, there’s really still not enough to carry the film beyond the half-hour mark. It definitely has its fair share of funny moments, but it would probably be better to just rent it somewhere down the line when you can savor the best bits and ignore the moments of bleak comic stasis.

Grade: C+