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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Friday, August 20, 2004

'Paddle' a mildly entertaining flick

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

Movie review

"Without a Paddle"


PG-13, for profanity, innuendo and violence

93 minutes
There's nothing like a ride down whitewater rapids to jump-start your zest for life. Especially when a couple of redneck marijuana farmers are shooting at you.

Seth Green, Matthew Lillard and Dax Shepard are three city slackers who've been friends since childhood.

They decide to take a journey they planned as kids 20 years ago in a tree house. They'll go along rivers in the Oregon wilderness in search of the $200,000 stash rumored to be left behind by D.B. Cooper, the fabled bank robber who parachuted into oblivion in 1971.

With little equipment and less skill, they're soon zigging and zagging down rapids in a canoe and confronting a particularly maternal (and funny) grizzly bear in the woods. But the bear is nothing compared with Elwood and Dennis, two dimwitted but dangerous hillbillies whose lucrative marijuana farm has replaced the moonshine stills of their father's day.

When our heroes inadvertently set the fields afire and enrage the brothers, mayhem ensues. And an almost unrecognizable Burt Reynolds shows up, just in time to reinforce the film's homage to his classic whitewater movie, "Deliverance."

"Without a Paddle" is a mildly amusing, late-summer diversion with some good chuckles interspersed with meandering moments.