Movie Review: Beer for My Horses

Jeff Miers - Buffalo News

Beer for My Horses - ***

"Beer for My Horses" is a few miles south of a great movie. And yet, like so many good ol' boy films that came before it, this one gets by on the charm and charisma of the actors and the apparent ease with which the cast interacts on screen.

Penned by country superstar Toby Keith and comedian Rodney Carrington, and inspired by the No. 1 hit duet of the same name -- a vehicle for Keith and Willie Nelson -- "Beer for My Horses" revels in low-brow redneck humor and takes great delight in trotting out every trailer-park cliche imaginable.

But it's funnier than hell an awful lot of the time. And that's exactly what Keith and Co. had in mind when they saddled up these "Horses." Call it Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke" for the anti-hippie, traditional American values set.

Like all buddy movies -- particularly ones centered on the doings of small-town cops -- "Beer for My Horses" leans heavily on the irreverent interplay of the ensemble cast. Small-town values are set in clear opposition to big-city mores, vigilante justice is celebrated over and above legal bureaucracy, common sense trumps college learnin', and so forth. Swilling Bud Light out of a can in your Ford pickup is all right, of course, but drugs -- well, that's another story. In the world conjured by "Beer for My Horses," good and evil, right and wrong -- it's all black and white, with no shades of gray.

Get over all of this, and the movie offers an amusing romp through the backwoods of the small town South and, later, northern Mexico. It also reveals Keith to be an absolute natural on screen and as a writer. The lines flow easily and comfortably, most of them hilarious, the rest more than expected. Happily, you have no trouble believing the people on screen would be saying the things they are and reacting to situations in the manner they do. Of particular import is the interplay between Keith's deputy sheriff Bill "Rack" Racklin and comic Carrington's Lonnie Freeman. The scenes shared between the two are the funniest of the bunch.

The plot ain't much to speak of, but it works. Racklin reunites with his ex-girlfriend, Annie, (Claire Forlani) just in time for her to be kidnapped by an evil Mexican drug lord-type, who is holding her in exchange for the release of his brother -- who's being held, of course, in Keith's jail. Racklin's boss, the grumpy town sheriff ably embodied by Tom Skerritt, cites him as too emotional to be involved in the case and sends him packing. "Rack" then gathers Lonnie, the strong, silent sharp-shooting Skunk (Ted Nugent, in a performance that threatens to steal the show every time he's on screen, accompanied by one of the many mighty riffs he's famous for) and Lonnie's bulldog, Junior, to take the law into their own hands.

The trio, plus dog, head

for Mexico and encounter much hilarity along the way. The rest is standard road trip, buddy movie stuff, punctuated by bursts of violence and a veneration of vigilante-ism that would make Steven Segal proud.

You can guess the rest, even if you ain't had no college learnin'. The film trades in plenty of stereotyping: Mexicans are drug dealers; small-town cops are heroes; farm towns are pure; cities are trashy; and men sow their wild oats while their woman wait patiently at home to have sex with them when they're done running wild.

Still, the film is idiomatically dead-on, well-written, smartly paced and provides plenty of belly laughs. That's exactly what it set out to do.

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Beer For My Horses

Three stars

Starring: Toby Keith, Rodney Carrington, Claire Forlani, Ted Nugent, Willie Nelson and Tom Skerritt

Director: Michael Salomon

Running Time: 93 minutes

Rated: PG-13 for violence, sexual humor, language, drug content and brief nudity

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