'Reno 911!' crew takes its raunch to big screen

Comedy has always rewarded those willing to lay it out there, pull out all the stops, risk it all and make themselves look incredibly stupid. But there's an utterly fearless streak running through comic movies these days. Comics, from Sacha

Borat

Baron Cohen to the

Jackass

gang, are taking one for the team, and for low, low laughs.

Reno 911!, the Comedy Central TV show, becomes Reno 911!: Miami in a movie that positions the troupe who star in it somewhere between Jackass and Cops. It's a Cops parody, and the players play it broad. They play it raunchy.

There is no humiliation they won't put themselves through to score a laugh. Too-revealing swimsuits on swimsuit-impaired bodies, inept demonstrations of the proctologist's tools-of-the-trade, sexual encounters of the most embarrassing kind - it's an R-rated version of the TV show, as if that's a good thing.

It's not quite all for naught. Reno does manage a titter here and a giggle there. But it's a cheap, dumb, obvious movie. How cheap? The big screen never seemed so small.

Thomas Lennon is Lt. Dangle, the aptly named, slightly closeted officer in charge of a team of eight Reno, Nev., sheriff's deputies. He's introduced shorts to his uniform that only a gay Australian football player could love.

"I've got to be able to move like a cheetah!"

His officers include the clueless Cherisa (Mary Birdsong), who pines for him, the in-denial lesbian Trudy (Kerri Kenney-Silver), the drawling rube Travis Junior (played by cowriter/director Robert Ben Garant), the zaftig tart Clementine (Wendi McLendon-Covey), Garcia (Carlos Alazraqui), Jones (Cedric Yarbrough), and the outrageous Raineesha (Niecy Nash), a woman who should never hit the beach in a T-back. But she does.

They go to a cop convention in Miami, are dissed and denied entrance, but when all the cops there are infected by a bio-agent, Team Reno takes to the streets, beaches and waterfront to protect and serve.

Or to party and score. And get tattoos.

Politically incorrect in the extreme, with mincing sissies and stereotypical black movie "types," they'd get away with it all if they were funnier. The TV show has always seemed more "local access" than network-ready. Cops, followed by a camera crew on their job as they doze off behind the wheel, flee real emergencies, and try (or try not to) hook up. I get it.

The movie takes time to sic the crew on an errant chicken crossing a road (gunfire is involved), spills blood (a weed-whacker torture), travels to the topless beach to deal with a dead whale, and tries to break up Miami rap impresario Suge Knight's birthday party.

Yee-ha.

Cameos by Danny DeVito (his company produced the film), the Rock, Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens, and Paul Rudd (imitating Al Pacino in Scarface) playing a drug kingpin, don't help. Not enough, anyway.

At least it's as brief as those shorts Dangle paints on himself every day. Seventy-five minutes? That's admitting you don't have enough ideas for a movie.

Maybe this plays better in Reno. On cable.

Produced by Danny DeVito, Robert Ben Garant, John Landgraf, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, directed by Robert Ben Garant. With Thomas Lennon, Mary Birdsong, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Niecy Nash, Paul Rudd.

Running time: 1 hour, 15 mins.

Parent's guide: R (sexual content, nudity, crude humor, profanity, drug use)

Playing at: area theaters

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