Having already demonstrated the worst that the horror, action, and fantasy genres have to offer, Uwe Boll tries his hand at political/cultural satire with Postal and comes up with something smelling awfully similar to feces. By virtue of his ever-so-slightly improved technical competence, the much-reviled German director suggests with his latest that, rather than a modern-day Ed Wood, he’s now destined to be Renny Harlin 2.0. Nonetheless, even über-hack Harlin would presumably be embarrassed to find himself mentioned in the same breath as this monumentally dim-witted and unfunny remake of a PC game, which is offensive not thanks to its equal-opportunity Naked Gun-via-Harold and Kumar jabs (at liberals, conservatives, women, minorities, foreigners, gays) but because of its wholesale inanity.
In an American town named Paradise, doormat Dude (Zack Ward) gets fed up with his rotten life and joins forces with his cult leader uncle (Dave Foley) to steal a shipment of popular penis-shaped Krotchy Dolls from a Third Reich-esque theme park before Osama bin Laden (Larry Thomas) and his al-Qaeda cohorts can do likewise. Bin Laden boasts an American accent, attends business seminars, and regularly telephones Dubya, who in turn is seen flying a toy airplane into Lego towers, a sight intended to be provocatively distasteful but proves only pathetic. The same holds true for the rest of Boll’s stereotype-mining humor (Asian women are bad drivers who should be shot, fat people are disgusting, terrorists care only about the number of virgins they’ll get post-martyrdom, everyone hates Jews), which exhibits all the intelligence of a drunken pig.
Foley flaunts his member, Seymour Cassel jokes about having sex with a hefty woman named “Bitch,” and Verne Troyer is raped by 1,000 monkeys, with the film’s embarrassingly desperate desire to shock culminating in the sound of a newscaster introducing a story titled “Why the World Trade Center Victims Deserved to Die.” Whereas true satire attempts to expose and ridicule human foolishness and immorality, Postal trades only in leaden tastelessness and sluggish irony (i.e. Dude kills people while wearing a “Peace” T-shirt), the real irony being that the cultural critique of this moronic video game-based fiasco isn’t half as sharp as that of an actual video game: Grand Theft Auto 4.
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