Bushwhacked

Greg Beeman, 1995
Rotten Tomatoes score: 11%

The Wikipedia article for Bushwhacked explains that it has an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but we're then reassured that the audience rating is 37%. So don't be misled by the abysmally low score; slightly more than one-third of audience members enjoyed it.

Basically, this is yet another exemplar of that venerable 1990s genre, the "crook gets mistaken for a kids' role model, then has to become a genuine role model in spite of himself" film. In that genre, I think this one ranks somewhere between Mr. Headmistress with Harland Williams and the excellent Principal Takes a Holiday with Kevin Nealon.

The crook this time around is Daniel Stern, and within the first 15 minutes he finds himself impersonating a "Ranger Scout" leader on an overnight camping trip in the mountains of northern California. The only problem is that Stern's character, Max Grabelski, isn't actually a crook. He's a slacker and a slob, but he is in fact innocent of the crime he's being pursued for. That's a big misstep—this kind of story works better when the protagonist is a non-threatening but genuinely culpable person; that way there's room for him to become a mensch. Since Max was never a scoundrel to begin with, his reformation doesn't have any real significance.

Instead, Max is merely suspected of murder. The few scenes that get us to this point are a totally confusing jumble. Max works for "Freedom Express," a courier service, and he has been involved in some vaguely sketchy business involving deliveries (with a fat tip for Max) to various locations at exactly 10 p.m. On one such delivery, he finds a house on fire, and the FBI shows up just in time to think Max is the arsonist. Then they discover an unrecognizable dead body with the teeth of millionaire Reinhart Bragden.

Instead of making any effort to resolve the situation, Max becomes a fugitive from justice. Here he crosses paths with a Ragtag Band of Kids who are embarking on their first overnight scouting event. They're expecting to be led by veteran scoutmaster Jack Erickson (R. Lee Erm—oh, no, sorry. This isn't R. Lee Ermey; it's Brad Sullivan). Max steals pseudo-R.Lee's hummer to elude the police, and before we know it he's been mistaken for the real deal.

The rest of the movie is mostly a lot of wacky wilderness adventures in the vein of The Great Outdoors. Max encounters a grizzly bear and faints, impressing the kids with his ability to "play dead." While collecting pine cones to build a fire, Max picks up a beehive. (He suffers no visible stings, but the dialogue inexplicably suggests that the scouts rescued him from anaphylaxis.) Max teaches the boys how to relieve themselves over the edge of a cliff. All the while, the kids are unaware that an FBI agent and the real scoutmaster Erickson are in pursuit.

When they finally do catch up, it turns out that the FBI guy has been in on the frame-up all along. He's been hired by Reinhart Bragden, who faked his own death for some reason, and now they're trying to kill Max. So now, for the final act of the movie, the kids decide to rally behind Max to stop the bad guys. This involves a huge number of death-defying cliffhanging stunts, which were actually pretty exciting to watch, with the exception of a gag where Max stretches himself across a crevice to act as a human bridge. This scene is so cartoony that it makes the other stunts seem less daring, since cartoons are never in real danger.

What's left to talk about? Obviously Max comes through in the end, and he wins the respect of the kids and the real scoutmaster.

This is a movie I missed as a kid. Now that I've seen it, I don't see why people didn't like it. I already mentioned the biggest problem, which is that Daniel Stern was too decent to begin with, so he didn't have a chance to go from bad to good. Other than that, I think its big problem was the PG-13 rating. They fixed that problem by removing the movie's one F-bomb for the DVD release, so now 28-year-old kids like me can enjoy it.