Not even Jessica's Daisy Dukes can save 'Hazzard'

A greedy old man in a white suit is secretly buying up all the property in a certain community for his own selfish, nefarious purposes. Say, isn't that the plot of Jack Nicholson's...

Forget it, folks. It's not "Chinatown."

It's "The Dukes of Hazzard," and you can forget it, too.

Warner Brothers Pictures 'The Dukes of Hazzard' D- The verdict: More P.U. than Yee-haw. Director: Jay Chandrasekhar Starring: Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds, Willie Nelson Run time: 106 minutes Release date: August 5, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, crude and drug-related humor, language and comic action violence. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "The Dukes of Hazzard"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

All them grinnin' yokels from the CBS hit series that ran from 1979 to '85 are back for the movie version. Those wild 'n' crazy moonshine-running Duke boys, Bo and Luke (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville). Black-hearted Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds). The souped-up '69 orange Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag painted on its roof. And, um, cheeky Daisy Duke, played by Jessica Simpson, who's fittingly introduced butt-first.

It's every bit as bad as you thought it'd be. Only worse.

Boss Hogg wants to strip-mine Hazzard County, and to keep the locals away from the court hearing he needs for a legal go-ahead, he stages a big race. The Dukes set out to foil him, on the track and off.

OK, so no one's going to see this for its sophisticated plot. They want to see the General Lee's iconic leap of faith off a bridge (accomplished before the opening credits). And watch Simpson go cheek to cheek, so to speak, against memories of the original Daisy, Catherine Bach.

None of this is fun. Not even the lowest-common-denominator kind of fun that explains high Nielsen ratings and huge opening weekends. Director Jay Chandrasekhar has added some third-rate raunchiness — smoking dope with college coeds for a T&A and drug-joke double whammy — that might be funny to a seventh grader. And the stunts are so-so — nothing we haven't already seen in "Herbie: Fully Loaded" or 28 years ago in "Smokey and the Bandit," the movie that invented the car-chase leap of faith.

The script is by Jonathan Davis and John O'Brien, the men who gave us "Catwoman" and "Starsky and Hutch." Between them, they've managed one good joke: A book-on-tape of "The Al Unser Jr. Story," read by Laurence Fishburne. The rest is hick humor, Daisy's-so-hot humor, etc. And what is a reference to Keyser Soze doing in a film with a phone that rings "Dixie"?

The screenplay's laziness escalates from annoying to insulting when Bo and Luke visit Atlanta and "Five Points University." The movie's version of the city — probably shot at the Warner Bros. Ranch — looks about as much like Atlanta as Sheboygan does Paris. An emblematic traffic jam is a nice touch, as well as a chance to deal with the General's questionable roof. But everything else is ridiculous.

The whole woeful enterprise might've been saved by the cast, but no such luck. Scott may be from Minnesota, but at least he has those Southern-boy slit eyes a la Patrick Swayze. But that's about all he has. Knoxville is a nonpresence. Simpson comes off as pure California, someone more likely to be sitting around a Beverly Hills swimming pool than serving beers to rednecks.

Chandrasekhar's movie doesn't even succeed as a dumb-and-dumber deal. Ben Jones, the original Cooter, was right when he warned fans away from this mess. Stay far away. Or stay home and rent the TV series.