Dudley de la montaña

Dudley Do-Right, Canadian Mountie (Brendan Fraser) is on his post in a remote village in Canada. A lifelong resident of the area, it was Dudley's childhood dream to become a Mountie. He lives in a small cabin with only his horse, Horse, as a companion. Yet, two people from Dudley's past resurface in the small, nearby village. One is Nell (Sara Jessica Parker) who Dudley has loved since their tweenage years. She has returned from a trip around the world and is more lovely than ever. But, alas, the other returnee is the dastardly Snidely Whiplash (Alfred Molina). He was Dudley's rival for Nell's affections long ago, despite his evil and conniving ways. Soon, Snidely has taken over the town's businesses, by hook and by crook, and is making a big play for Nell's attention while Dudley manages to upset the ruling party in Ottawa and is fired from his post. The world is looking pretty harsh to Dudley, that is for certain. Will he recover his job and win the heart of Nell? This is a second, cartoon-based film for Fraser, after the infinitely more successful George of the Jungle. The same creative minds were at work here but the results are far from perfect. Don't blame the cast, however, for Fraser, Parker, and Molina, with a bit of help from Eric Idle and Alex Rocco, are the reasons to see the film at all. Simply put, they are terrific and rise above the mundane script and uneven direction. Certainly, there are some very funny scenes, such as the one in which Snidely orders a poor lady and her children out of their home or where Dudley has the bad luck to have a moose head fall on him during a critical moment with Nell. Now, that's entertainment. Unfortunately, though, a few good scenes do not a great film make. Yet, if you like silly nonsense with likable stars, you might take a chance with this film. Yes, it may elicit a yawn here or there, but it's truly not a bad way to spend a couple of leisure hours.

My five year old adored Brendan Fraser in Disney's "George of the Jungle." I loved the movie too, and we saw it a total of nine times over the four months it ran at local theatres in the summer of 1998. We now own on it DVD; it was the first one we ever purchased, and its publication prompted us to buy the player for my computer, in fact.

What made "George of the Jungle" so great was that Disney remained true to character of the cartoon George and built an exciting and well-written plot around a very fine performance by one of the cutest actors to ever come out of Hollywood. My son and I would sit in the theatre and laugh ourselves silly as joke after joke had the kids and parents rolling in the aisles. George was sweet, funny, and (for the moms) very, very sexy. You could see Fraser's talent and intelligence shining through in places and the result was incredibly likeable.

Unfortunately, Fraser's Dudley is less than stupid, inconsistently clumsy, and completely lacking in any charm whatsoever. I think that Fraser's underlying intelligence actually works against his moronic character, and despite playing opposite a convincing Snidely Whiplash, Fraser's performance is frankly- horrible! I'm not sure if it's Fraser's fault, though. What can anyone do, no matter how much he dimples, to win over an audience to what has to be the most inconsistently developed and poorly written characters of all time? One moment we are asked to love Dudley for his clumsiness and purity of heart. Then we are asked to applaud Do Right's transition into a machine gun toting biker bad boy who is suddenly and inexplicably traipsing about (in an animal skin loincloth, no less) like a Solid Gold dancer. (And of the Native American musical: just how does one clog in moccasins and bare feet? Even the sound effects in the film were senseless.)

I wasn't the only one who hated the film, either. Bored with trying to read my son's Batman comic book during light scenes, I looked around sometime near the middle of the movie to find kids fidgeting in their seats and parents yawning. A few adults were close to tears with boredom and I noticed that precisely at 8:20, when there was still time to grab tickets for the next showing of "A Dog in Flanders", almost half of the audience left the theatre. I grabbed our things, but my son, excited to see Fraser again, made me stay. How I came to envy those parents with children less stubborn than my own! Only twice I heard laughter, and once I joined in. There were a total of four clever lines in the film, in the scene where Dudley is being trained to be bad by some innocuous dirty miner who simply shows up for no discernible reason.

He tells George "Now, say… I am dangerous."

Dudley replies, "You are dangerous."

The miner makes a face and says, "No, say you are dangerous."

"I already said that." says Dudley.

This is almost as clever as the repartee between Bugs and Daffy in the episodes where they vie to convince Elmer which of them he should shoot, but Warner can certainly sustain this kind of thing longer (and I don't have to shell out over twelve dollars for my son and myself to see it.) With Dudley things simply went from bad to worse and culminated into a cinematic experience that I found even more disgusting than that hitherto greatest of all celluloid stink-bombs, "Highlander 2".

You would think that such a simplistic character as a bungling Canadian Mountie could have translated fairly easily onto the big screen. What's not to understand about Dudley? He's drawn in simple lines, has predictable dialogue and only comes in three colours. Yet Disney managed to fail utterly. They even misunderstood Nell, if you can believe that this version of the irritating little blonde has a string of graduate degrees and then has trouble deciding if she should choose Snidely over Dudley. Of course, this Dudley was so lame that he did make Snidely look good, but I still think that two hours of re-runs of the cartoons would have been more entertaining than the plot-less wonder I was forced to see till its end. Not only did the movie fail to portray Do Right within any scope of reasonable resemblance, but they went on to change what the filmmakers obviously did not understand. If you make Dudley bad, or graceful, you completely lose any coherence in his character. He simply doesn't make sense any more and that's not amusing, that's punishment for parents whose children won't allow them to leave early.

In sum, although my five year old defends the film, it is this adult's perspective that "this movie sucks like a tornado, eh." I truly hated it. If Fraser doesn't get himself a new agent and do some better work, I don't know how I can take my son see another one of the travesties on film that he's been getting himself caught up in. For shame Disney, for shame, what you did to that wonderful young man (and to your audience)!

What we have here is a failure to communicate any of the satire created by genius Jay Ward! Mr. Wilson made so many mistakes in telling Dudley's story that I believe this is simply not the Dudley Do-Right story, this was someone elses story. The set up should have centered more on the Mounties and less on Whiplash's plan, which dominated the entire film. Never once did Dudley have to rescue Nell, in fact, she seemed smittened by Whiplash. This gave less-than-attractive Sara Jessica Parker very little to do, not that as an actress, she has much to bring to the table. Aside from this, her character, Nell, was (under) written as though the writer (s) didn't want the character in the first place. Maybe, because Parker was re-cast in the role. Second Choice?

The character of Horse, which could have been an interesting character asset to Dudley were is not for the fact that he disappears a quarter into the film without explanation, was handled wrong. Likewise, Eric Idle's character seemed as though he might have been three separate characters in an original draft of the script. And now strung together, so the producers could use Idle's talents.

The flavor of the original cartoon is no where to be found.

Fraser and Alex Rocco were as wonderful as Parker and Molina were not up to snuff. However considering what they had to work with -- they were all okay ... silly set-ups, no pay offs and a script that seemed aimless at times leaves devotees of genius Jay Ward saddened.

Brendan Fraser wasted his time and talent and Sarah Jessica Parker made the biggest movie mistake in choosing to star in "Dudley Do-Right."

"Dudley Do-Right" is the type of movie everyone hopes will be a success. Unfortunately, the writing did not measure up to the level of talent that signed on to the movie. It is always fun to watch comedic spoofs if they are written well and are logical. However, this film broke both these rules.

It was clear that there was no plot or humor in "Dudley Do-Right." The only thing that made it bearable was the narrator because he is the only character who kept my interest.

SKIP this movie because you will be sorely disappointed if you don't

Jay Ward's cute but bland cartoon about Canada's No. #1 Mountie plays even worse when brought to the big screen as a live-action comic adventure. Brendan Fraser is spirited and very adept at buffoonish slapstick, but he's not the right actor for Dudley Do-Right; he's a big, handsome lunk, and he's cheerful enough, but he doesn't know how to mug, nor is he helped by his limited voice (a deep monotone). It's always nice to see Sarah Jessica Parker in a film, but she isn't cast right either; as love-interest Nell, Parker gets no funny lines, she's too modern and grounded a presence, although she does help enliven a dance sequence about 47 minutes into the proceedings. Alfred Molina attempts to have fun as egomaniacal villain Snidely Whiplash, but his voice and fake mustache are his only props. The pithy announcer gets some dryly comic lines and Dudley's horse (named Horse, ha ha) shoots off a few raspberries, but this is a very dim slapstick vehicle, short on inspiration, poorly conceived and even more unmemorable than its cartoon predecessor. * from ****