When Brian Herzlinger asked one of his mentors what he thought of his quest to have dinner with Drew Barrymore in the documentary My Date with Drew, Brian's confidant replied, "The dumbing-down of America is now complete." Perhaps he should have waited until the release of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, a film providing more than enough evidence to support that argument.

Fresh from success in both the stand-up comedy circuit and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movies, the abrasive funnyman Larry the Cable Guy makes his fictional film debut with this unfortunately underwhelming vehicle. Larry plays, what else, a government health inspector, one whose lifestyle is as slovenly as they come but whose knack for cracking down on health code violators is unmatched. However, Larry's boss (Tom Wilson) has grown of his crude antics. They give the department a bad name, so he sets Larry up with a by-the-book partner (Iris Bahr) to whip him into shape. At the same time, a mysterious outbreak of poisonings starts sweeping throughout the city's fanciest restaurants. Taking on the case, Larry starts conducting the investigation and romancing an attractive waitress (Megyn Price), using his own rude, unconventional, and southern-fried methods.

Normally, this would be the part where I'd talk about how fans of Larry the Cable Guy would be more likely to  appreciate the movie he's starring in than other viewers, but in this case, I'm not so sure. I've been a Larry fan ever since the first Blue Collar movie, but Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector waters down his act (which usually consists of Larry making a very tasteless joke and immediately apologizing for it) so much, any two-bit comic with an itch for breaking out into movies could have slapped their name in the title and performed the script note for note. This movie takes all the bite out of Larry's style and leaves him floundering in an overly-restrained playing field where every joke is more bland than the last one.

It doesn't take long for Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector to show its true colors, its comedic defenses weakening under the pressure of one idiotic and humorless premise. The film runs the gamut of gags, desperately scrambling to find something to make the audience laugh, be it jabs at the handicapped or a good old-fashioned diarrhea sequence, only to come up dry and fall flat on its face each and every time. That, and the movie's attempts to sustain an actual plot are more laughable than any of the gags served up in an awkwardly paced and lazy storyline that manages to render itself extremely confusing. 

It's normally an exaggeration when someone says a comedy doesn't have any good jokes, but in the case of Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, it's the truth. I didn't laugh once during the whole movie, a feat matched this year only by the dreadful Date Movie. If this dud is any indication of where Larry's career as a leading man is headed, he'd better get a few more Blue Collar movies off the ground fast.

MY RATING: * (out of ****)

(Released by Lions Gate Films and rated "PG-13" for crude and sexual content and for language.)