Not Much Of Anything, And Too Arrogant In What It Is.

Rating: 4/10 (13 May 2007)

Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid are tragically funny in this vehicle wherein a washed up, one-handed participant of the national bowling circuit recruits an Amish farm-boy nobody to help him pull various scams to get to a bowling tournament in Reno with a million dollar payoff, all unbeknownst to the Amish nobody.
Harrelson is the star, with Bill Murray taking the part of his competitional nemesis. Harrelson actually surprised me with his performance herein. I do not know what I expected really, but his performance surpassed those unknown expectations. Randy Quaid is so not Amish that it was amusing watching him as a man who is not Amish, trying to pretend to be Amish, convincingly, and not. But he did not mean to be convincing. It's merely the tenor of his performance which makes you half buy into his Amishness (if you can dig it).
The weakest element here was Bill Murray. I hate to say that, as I have been a fan for thirty years, or so, but he is not nearly as great as his ego makes him believe, and his arrogance in this vehicle lost its humor when the character's megalomania too closely approached his own, thereby rendering the character a non-character in my book, and negating his performance as a performance.
All in all, this is amusing, but not highly so, and is seriously overrated by the users here at IMDb. "The greatest comedy of the 90's" it isn't! It rates a 4.4/10 from...
the Fiend :.