Raunchy, Rated R Comedy With A Stacked Cast Is The Ultimate Backwoods Tour
Written by Robert Scucci | Published
One of my favorite guilty pleasure movies of 2004 Without a Paddlestarring Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, and Dax Shepard. The film follows the same kind of beats you'd find in any coming-of-age story, except it's about a group of 30-year-olds with pre-teen problems while hunting for the long-lost treasure their recently deceased friend spent his life trying to find. It's silly, slapstick, and the farthest thing from what most people would call good cinema, but it's fun, and I love it.
A worthy spiritual follower Without a Paddlein 2012 Nature Calls offers the same kind of humor, but with an R rating. That means more swearing, fighting, and even some good old-fashioned nudity lost in the wilderness to keep things interesting. It also doesn't hurt that the cast is loaded with talent, including, but not limited to, Patton Oswalt, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Riggle, Patrice O'Neal, and Maura Tierney.
Everyone in between Nature Calls they faithfully do what you know them to do, and their chemistry is exactly what you would expect. I enjoyed watching it play out because I'm a fan of everyone involved. The story itself, though? There isn't much going on, and you'll soon realize that the first confrontation is just a set piece to introduce joke after joke, some of which hold up better than others.
Watch This For Talent, Not Plot
I'm not so much of a cynic that I can't appreciate a movie that doesn't do much but still manages to be funny. But I will still call Nature Calls what it is: a giant nothingburger.
Here's the story: Randy Stevens (Patton Oswalt) is a loyal Boy Scout who wants to make his elderly father, a former troop leader now living on assisted living, proud. He wants to take all the local kids on an epic camping trip, but his brother Kirk (Johnny Knoxville) is actually a tech bro who wouldn't be caught dead camping in the woods. Randy, in a moment of love, kidnaps all the sleeping children at Kirk's and takes them anyway.
Kirk doesn't want to go down without a fight, so he brings his security guard, Gentry (Rob Riggle), and Mr. Caldewell (Patrice O'Neal) to the campsites to round up the boys and bring them back to their slumber party, complete with tons of TVs and video games, at his McMansion. Hilarity ensues.
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The rest of the Nature Calls it involves Randy getting into a series of accidents despite his extensive outside knowledge, Kirk being given his ass in ways only Johnny Knoxville can tolerate, Rob Riggle making that face he always makes before saying something he thinks is funny, and, my favorite part, Patrice O'Neal being so inept because he doesn't know how to handle children.
The combination of funny people is enough to carry the movie like Nature Calls from start to finish, to the point where the situation and conflict don't matter. This could take place in a bowling alley or theme park, or the characters could be kidnapped and need to escape. Anything, really. It just so happens that they are lost in the woods and brave here.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but any movie where Patton Oswalt gets in over his head despite his best intentions, Johnny Knoxville is set on fire, Patrice O'Neal drops F-bombs in front of innocent children, and Rob Riggle walks around with a gun even though no one feels threatened by him is going to be laughed at. Rated R Little Giants humor, and it's inherently funny if that's the kind of humor you're looking for, regardless of context. The problem is, I think they all knew this and decided that after the initial setup everyone could do their own thing.
If you're a fan of the comedy talent available at Nature Callsyou'll probably enjoy it more than you'd like to admit. Just be warned: there's not much storytelling here, just a bunch of funny people working their schtick with varying degrees of success.
From this writing, you can broadcast Nature Calls free on Tubi.
