STUDIO: Event Film Distribution
RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2008
STARRING: Zack Ward, Dave Foley, Chris Coppola, J.K. Simmons, Verne Troyer, Chris Spencer, Jackie Tohn, Ralf Moeller, Larry Thomas, and Michael Pare
WRITTEN BY: Uwe Boll & Bryan C. Knight
DIRECTED BY: Uwe Boll
GENRE: Comedy
RATING: R

Continuing to brutally criticize a man who has received nothing but bad reviews his entire career and actually has watched a petition form online to force his retirement kind of feels like overkill. You almost want to root for a guy who can take so many hits and not only keep on going but still claim that we're all wrong and he's right. The Ed Wood style chutzpah that it takes to claim that Postal is better than Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and that he's a better actor/writer/director than George Clooney is certainly admirable. But the fact is that Uwe Boll is still making movies and they're not getting any better (in fact his 2008 output - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and Postal are, in many ways, his worst films yet). So, while it may sound like piling on an already defeated man to join the critical gang-bang, the fact is that it costs a lot of money for two people to park, buy tickets, and popcorn and critics still feel a duty to make sure you know what you're getting into when your paycheck goes to a Boll flick. We should all know better by now. But we'll be brief.

What plot there is in Postal, if you could call it "plot", features "Postal Dude" (Zack Ward), the lead character from the video game (it wouldn't be a Boll movie without a video game to point back to), a pretty unlucky guy. He lives in a world-gone-mad, where gunfire breaks out at the Welfare Office and cops kill drivers who take too long at the stoplight. He teams up with his uncle Dave (Dave Foley), the head of a religious cult, who discovers that he owes millions in back taxes. To make a buck and pay the IRS, Dave and his nephew decide to steal a shipment of Krotchy Dolls, stuffed figures shaped like something that rhymes with "weenus". Postal Dude's bad luck continues because Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban also want to hijack the shipment of phallic toys to fill them with avian flu. Of course, Osama calls his buddy Dubya for help. Boll thinks just the fact that Bush and OBL might be buddies is hilarious.

What's wrong with Postal can be summed up pretty easily - it's a comedy that's never once funny. There's not a single genuine laugh because Boll mistakes shock value for actual writing. There's an old-fashioned sentiment about tragedy being something bad that happens to you and comedy being something bad happening to someone else and Boll takes that to the extreme in Postal, a film that features a Nazi amusement park, children being shot, monkeys raping Verne Troyer, and the implication that it was the passengers of the first plane that flew into the World Trade Center that were really to blame (the pilots were about to go to the Bahamas). Laughing yet? Like Nelson on The Simpsons, Boll finds humor in pointing at extreme tragedy and laughing. Yes, it's all done to an extreme that it can't be taken seriously and I'm not saying that Boll ever intends us to do so, but shock for shock's sake is simply not funny. You need to actually do something with the parody, not just go the extreme to provoke. South Park and Borat feature just as much offensive humor, but there's a difference between comedy and shock and Boll forgets the laughs in Postal.