'Half-Baked' All Lame

Cast's talents wasted in film

What were those studio executives smoking when they green-lighted
"Half-Baked"? If they were high, it might explain how this distinctly
unfunny comedy about a quartet of hapless potheads ever got made.

The best thing that can be said about "Half-Baked" - which sneaked into
theaters last Friday without a press screening (almost always a sign that a
studio is hiding something) - is that the title does not mislead.

The cast includes several comedians, including Jim Breuer of "Saturday
Night Live," Harland Williams and Dave Chappelle, who are popular with
young people, at whom this movie evidently is aimed. But their comic
talents are completely wasted by an inane script whose idea of humor is to
make jokes about lung cancer and the notorious Tuskegee experiment on black
men with syphilis. Chappelle, who stars as the ringleader, Thurgood, has
no one to blame except himself - he co-wrote the script (with Neal
Brennan).

In the opening scene, set in the mid-80's, four adolescent buddies get
their first whiff of marijuana. That's it - they are hooked. The next
time we see them, they're grown men working menial jobs just to earn enough
to sit around getting stoned. The pipe they keep in a place of honor for
these occasions is called Billy Bong Thornton.

Thurgood has a supplier at his corner grocery store in New York. The
problem is the grocer doesn't always recognize his face. Thurgood has to
turn around adn pull down his pants before the guy smiles and says, "Hey -
it's black a--." (Butt jokes also are big in the movie.)

Becoming ravenously hungry one night - marijuana will do that to you -
another of the group, Kenny (Harland Williams) is dispatched to buy junk
food. He feeds some of it to a police department patrol horse. When the
horse, who turns out to have been diabetic, dies, Kenny is arrested and
labeled a "cop killer" in the tabloids.

Here's when things really get stupid. To get Kenny out of jail, his
friends turn to drug dealing, which leads them to robbery. Of course,
they're so inept that before long they're wanted both by the police and a
big-time drug lord.

"Half-Baked" has a few moments when you don't want to throw tomatoes at the
screen. Thurgood falls for a woman (the adorable Rachel True), though the
movie has to muck this up by giving her the name Mary Jane. Their first
time in bed, captured in photos after the face, is sweet and sexy.

The bit when Thurgood describes some of the people who come to him for pot
is marginally funny, particularly a cameo by Willie Nelson as the "You
Shoulda Been There Smoker," describing what it was like in the '60s.

In case anyone should get the idea that the filmmakers are extolling
marijuana, there's a kind of disclaimer at the end. After all the credits
have rolled, Chappelle comes on and tells young people that if they want to
know about illegal substances such as marijuana, they should go to the
library because "the more you read, the smarter you are." Since almost no
one sticks around this long in a movie, even the disclaimer is half-baked.