uncomfortably unfunny

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2015)

Steve Barker (Johnny Knoxville) goes to his boss to ask for a promotion. His first job is to fire the janitor Stavi. He can't bring himself to do it and instead hires him to mow his lawn. Stavi accidentally cuts off his finger and Steve needs $28k to get it reattached. His sleazy uncle Gary (Brian Cox) comes up with the idea to fix the Special Olympics. Gary wants him to pose as mentally challenged to beat the pentathlon champ Jimmy Washington. He falls for event organizer Lynn Sheridan (Katherine Heigl).
The start is pretty weak with a wishywashy lead character. I don't think Knoxville is particularly good at playing that character. Katherine Heigl is fairly wooden in this. Knoxville pretending to be slow is par for the course for most of his movies. None of these problems mean the end of the world. I actually like the real handicap actors in this. The biggest problem I have are all the actors acting as mentally handicap. It feels demeaning and fake. Unless they are trying to be Dustin Hoffman doing Rain Man, this was never going to work. They are better off simply getting real handicap actors to do the roles. Even if they can't quite say the lines, they could concentrate the acting to the few that seem to do good work. It's kind of insulting. It's uncomfortable. It's not funny. I just keep thinking that Knoxville is suppose to be stupid and funny for faking a mental handicap. Yet there are all these other actors who are actually faking mental handicap and the audience has to take them seriously.