Honesty is a quality all too undervalued in critics (it usually takes a back seat to the ability to create short, penetrating little missiles of inanity that can be featured on a film’s poster come awards season), so I’ll come clean with you right now: I walked into Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day fully expecting to hate it, and already crafting impossibly clever sentiments designed to let everyone know just how awful it was. But I didn’t hate it. I certainly didn’t like it, and I didn’t laugh once, but it defied my expectations as to what I was about to see in ways that weren’t really pleasing, though I’m still a little befuddled by.
Ricky (Robb Wells, the obnoxious one), Julian (John Paul Tremblay, the leader) and Bubbles (Mike Smith, the one who seems to deliberately evoke Milton from Office Space with every single line reading) are the Trailer Park Boys, featured characters on a Canadian television show with which I am completely unfamiliar. At the beginning of this outing, they are just being released from prison for acts presumably perpetrated in prior installments. When they attempt to gather up the pieces of their prior lives, they find that the trailer park that they had called home has been converted into a rather disgustingly sanitized hellscape at the hands of developer Jim Lahey (John Dunsworth) and his hairy-backed, frequently shirtless, lackey Randy (Patrick Roach). The boys have their own plans for going straight (some of which are straighter than others), which, for the most part, come into conflict with Lahey’s vision of an upstanding, decent park, and comic hijinx ensue. As the film goes on, however, this premise becomes increasingly threadbare, and those thinnest notions of a plot are essentially disposed of in favor of manic schemes that seem to constantly involve overweight men running around with their shirts off.
Even though the show and the characters are all Canadian, the archetypes are all pretty familiar to American middle-class comedy; the weirdoes, the loudmouths, the wannabes, the jerks, and, to a much lesser extent, the women. All are present in Trailer Park Boys, and all are drawn in the broadest possible terms, suggesting a mid-90s effort from a Saturday Night Live alum. Where Trailer Park Boys differs, however, is in its approach. Ostensibly a mockumentary (the camera and the boom guys walk into the frame occasionally), the film plays as fast and loose with the boundaries of the genre as The Office does, bringing the story into places where a camera crew would not logically be. This does, however, free the film from the constraints of the omnipresent ba-boom-ching moment as characters say things that we’ve been cued to think is funny, and then wait for us all to laugh. When the jokes aren’t funny, there is perhaps nothing more painful. In its easy going nature and willingness to fill the screen with nothing but people talking to each other (not to mention its rustic setting), the film reminded me more than once of Gummo. It’s a format that Americans, myself included, really aren’t all that familiar with, which may explain why the show’s never gained much of a foothold in this country.
The only remaining X-factor then is whether the film is funny or not. For my part, I didn’t really think it was. I didn’t find any of the characters amusing (and frankly, thought they were kind of irritating most of the time), and so it was hard for me to be all that engaged when they were causing all sorts of chaos. Obviously, the show has some appeal for some people, considering just how long it’s been running for. I’m not going to try and tell people what’s funny and what isn’t, but odds are, if you’re the kind of person who would like this, you’ve probably already discovered it or will soon. If you’re not, then you’re unlikely to watch it, although if you do, you might be surprised that you disliked it in a way that you weren’t at all expecting to.
DVD and Blu-ray Bonus Features
The DVD and Blu-ray copies of The Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day feature the same extras - nothing here to provoke a Blu-ray purchase instead of the DVD.
Deleted Scenes - Boy are there a lot of them. I guess that’s what happens when you shoot in this style.
Alternate Ending - Not to give away anything, but it would have altered the beginning of this film, too.
Sunnyvale Stories: The Making Of The Countdown To Liquor Day - Pretty standard stuff.
Randy Gets A New Look
The Making Of The Car Chase
"Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day" is on sale February 23, 2010 and is rated R. Comedy, Documentary. Directed by Mike Clattenburg. Written by Mike Clattenburg & Rob Wells & John Paul Tremblay & Mike Smith & Timm Hannebohm (Screenplay). Starring John Dunsworth, John Paul Tremblay, Mike Smith, Patrick Roach, Rob Wells.
