Trailer Park Boys: The Movie – A Review
by Wyndham Wise

If you like the television show, and find the adventures of Ricky, Julien, Bubbles and the rest of the crew living at the Sunnyvale Trailer Park hilarious, then you’ll love this movie. If you find their humour to be juvenile and somewhat mindless, and never watch the show, then chances are you’ll give the movie a pass as well. This one is definitely for the fans of Canada’s top-rated cable comedy, now entering into its seventh season on Showcase.

Trailer Park Boys: The Movie opens with the boys getting busted for a botched ATM heist and tossed in jail, again. There they end up playing ball hockey with the guards; however, the problem is their team is winning, so they get thrown out of jail before they can compete in the tournament finals. Once outside, Ricky (Robb Wells) schemes to pull off “The Big Dirty,” the one-time heist of so much coin – which he figures to be untraceable – that they will be able to retire from a life of petty crime. Julien (John Paul Tramblay) is skeptical that “The Big Dirty” will work and prefers smaller jobs, and of course Bubbles (Mike Smith), the trio’s conscience, is against it. Meanwhile, Lucy (Lucy DeCoutere), Ricky’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, is working in a strip club run by Sonny (Hugh Dillon), a minor gangster with his eye on her. Throw into the mix Mr. Lahey’s (John Dunsworth) plan to kick the boys out of the park for non-payment of fees, and you have a 90-minute extended version of any one their shows.

A large part of the show’s charm, and by extension the movie’s charm, is the lack of any post-modern irony. The characters are real and the situations believable. Although the boys are dim bulbs, they are not vicious or mean, just likeable losers looking for an easy, hassle-free life of sex, dope and booze. Like any of the classic comic groupings of the past – the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges come immediately to mind – they have their own strong personalities that are complimentary. Bubbles is the child-like one, analogous to Harpo or Curly, Julien the “smarter” one – think of Larry or Chico – and Ricky is the ringleader with a plan, i.e. Groucho or Moe. What makes them different, of course, is that they are one hundred per cent proudly Canadian and have very foul mouths.

The movie, written by the series creator/director Mike Clattenburg and Robb Wells, has the same ragged-style and tone of the original, which will appeal to its very large fan base. It should also do well internationally in the markets where the show has already aired. The big question is whether it can break into the lucrative American market. The fact that Ivan Ghostbusters Reitman came on board as executive producer should give Trailer Park Boys: The Movie some leverage, and the series ran for a while on BBC America, although with the extensive bleeps to mask the swearing it was soon pulled. In the current uptight moral client of Bush’s America, is our big brother to the south ready for the boys from Sunnyvale and “The Big Dirty”?

Also see:The Cast & Crew of Trailer Park Boys.

This review was written for Northernstars.ca by Wyndham Wise and is Copyright © 2006 by Northernstars.ca. Click here for more information about copyright.