MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WHOOPEE BOYS’RUN AMOK

Etiquette and class are the comic targets in “The Whoopee Boys” (citywide), a new movie that follows the scabrous, social-climbing escapades of two big-city con men on the loose among the elite of Palm Beach, Fla.

Ah, here they are again, up to their zany antics: our old friends, the daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys! Those madcap movie scamps descend once again on the local social elite--treating us to a nonstop barrage of jokes about armpits, toilets, ethnic eccentricities, bodily functions and unusual sexual practices.

After a while, you wonder about their strategy. Smooth-talking Jake Bateman (Michael O’Keefe) attends Phelps Institute of Etiquette to pick up enough social graces to win the hand of the local beleaguered ingenue. Meanwhile, his buddy, East Los Angeles barrio slickster Barney Bonnare (Paul Rodriguez), tags along, pretending to be his chauffeur, and proceeds to gross out everyone within earshot. If a snobbish patrician is anywhere near, Barney will sidle up, leer and begin blasting away like a Las Vegas lounge comedian with an audience of bored drunks.

Rodriguez is a funny comedian with a good, smirkingly brash, on-top-of-it-all delivery. But he probably sets a record here for most bad, broad, scatological jokes in one above-ground movie. (Was he responsible for some of them?)

If Barney’s behavior seems senseless and self-indulgent, it’s probably because the movie itself is senseless and self-indulgent.

Director John Byrum usually seems at his best with something slightly mannered (even the Cassadys and Jack Kerouac became stylized in his hands), which makes the approach here doubly peculiar. One hesitates to blame the writers ---- since so many of the scenes have an improvised air ---- but something has gone limp with the comic construction of this movie. It feels like a whoopee cushion that’s leaking. There’s not enough energy left to offend you.