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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/18/07)

Movies in which the same person serves as writer, director, and star should carry a special warning for audiences, even if that individual happens to be an actor as endearing as Luke Wilson. Cinema is a collaborative art. When a single individual wears all the hats, there's no one along the way to tap that person on the shoulder and warn that things aren't working. The Wendell Baker Story could have used just such a reality check, beginning with an appraisal of its lead character.

Inspired by a certain style of '70s storytelling, Wilson cobbled together a scrappy little movie in the vein of director-heroes Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson that plays more like the less sophisticated family films of the same era (although certain gags, including one in which Wendell's charitable attempt to help a little boy use the urinal is mistaken as child abuse, are anything but kid-friendly). Where movies like Five Easy Pieces uncovered insights into the human condition while rambling through crazy, cross-country narratives, The Wendell Baker Story falls back on a silly plot and stuffs it full of self-help lessons.

The Big Lebowski aside, slackers make notoriously bad protagonists, and the Cool Hand Luke-like Wendell Baker character offers little to recommend himself as a hero (certainly none of Paul Newman's smoldering inner rage). With a bad suit on his back and a Burt Reynolds cigarillo tucked between his choppers, Wendell is a small-time scam artist who makes his living selling fake IDs to illegal immigrants. He begins the movie with the girl of his dreams, Doreen (Eva Mendes), a knockout beauty who'd gladly spend the rest of her days with him if only Wendell could bring himself to say the "L word." Has there ever been a more insipid obstacle to on-screen romance than waiting for a reluctant hero to profess his love?

As it turns out, Doreen is little more than a device to bring conflict and closure to an otherwise scatterbrained story, just as Wilson's professed affinity for '70s movies serves mostly as a smokescreen for the movie's inelegant plot. What seems to amuse the Wilsons most (Luke enlisted brother Andrew to codirect and Owen to costar, calling in favors from Will Ferrell and others in amusing cameos) are the character's harebrained schemes. The fake ID scam lands Wendell in the slammer, where, relieved of real-world responsibility, he's free to do what he wants with his time.

Once paroled, Wendell decides to make something of himself, bringing his well-meaning but decidedly anti-authoritarian sensibility to his next endeavor: working in a crooked retirement home. With the help of the stubborn old cusses confined to its walls (played by screen greats Seymour Cassel, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristofferson), Wendell will actually have the chance to be a hero — as if audiences had any such expectations on the character's otherwise directionless misadventures. After freewheeling for 90 minutes, the movie feels compelled to deliver a conventional ending, but its only real pleasures are the detours along the way.

— Peter Debruge