text: The Dukes of Hazzard is quite an achievement  a $53m film that's worse than any given episode of a downmarket 25-year old TV show. The plot is serviceable enough but the mindless fun is rarely to be found and the casting is pretty atrocious: Johnny Knoxville is more passenger than protagonist, M.C. Gainey's Sheriff Roscoe is a bland thug, Michael Weston's Enos tiresome, a seemingly ideally-cast Willie Nelson just seems to be waiting for the check to clear and Burt Reynolds, stuck in some purgatory where he's doomed to relive his old movies as a bit player, is a curious choice for Boss Hogg to say the least but does have one good moment with a heckler and a hundred dollar bill. You know a film is in trouble when Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson are the most charismatic screen presences But worse than the script or the casting is Jay Chandrasekhar's hopeless direction: seemingly born with no conception of comic timing, unable to do much more than basic two-shots and seemingly clueless as to how to shoot a car chase let alone the couple of decent stunts in the film, he seems determined to sap the film of any signs of life before they materialise. There are a couple of neat post-modern moments revolving around the Confederate Flag and Daisy's stereotypical role in every episode, but no film that makes you pine for the days when Hal Needham was directing this sort of thing (and badly) can be a good thing.