metacritic.com: Witless Protection

Witless Protection

Starring Larry The Cable Guy, Jenny McCarthy, Peter Stormare, Eric Roberts, Ivana Milicevic, and Joe Mantegna

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor

Lionsgate
Comedy
97 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters February 22, 2008

During a routine day spent patrolling his small town, Larry witnesses a beautiful, high-class woman, Madeleine, being held against her will by four mysterious, black-suited men. Recognizing the opportunity to save the day, Larry "kidnaps" her, only to learn that Madeleine is actually a key witness in a high-stakes Chicago crime case and her captors are FBI agents assigned to protect her. Madeleine is furious. But Larry, who rightly suspects that the agents are crooked and Madeleine is in danger, forces her on a harebrained trip to Chicago to solve the case himself. Together, the hilariously mismatched duo must grapple with angry FBI agents, quack doctors, and Chicago high society in his funniest, most unpredictable adventure yet. (Lionsgate)

WRITTEN BY
Charles Robert Carner

DIRECTED BY
Charles Robert Carner

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

17 / 100

Critic Reviews

40	The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz The slapstick and action set pieces are lame, and its performances range from competent to annoying.
30	The Hollywood Reporter At least a fright-wigged Joe Mantegna, delivering an execrable cameo as a whacked-out doctor, has a good excuse for his presence; the writer-director is one of his former film students.
30	Variety John Anderson If you need a GPS unit to find your own backside, you'll be laughing uproariously at Witless Protection, a movie that's far more interesting politically than dramatically -- or, God knows, comically.
30	LA Weekly Luke Y. Thompson Still, it’s hard to despise the movie, especially when Peter Stormare shows up over-enunciating the most brilliantly awful English accent of all time.
25	Boston Globe It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.
0	The Onion (A.V. Club) Steven Hyden Larry The Cable Guy is a cancerous boil on the ass of comedy, but it's still sort of shocking how little effort he puts into his movies.

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