Joe Dirt Got Buried by Critics. David Spade's Mullet Movie Is Better Than You Think

Joe Dirt came out in April 2001, directed by Dennie Gordon and written by David Spade and Fred Wolf, and the critics went at it like it owed them money. On Rotten Tomatoes it sits at roughly 10 percent, depending on the day you check, which puts it just ahead of a dental cleaning and just behind a jury summons. It cost about $17.7 million and made a little over $27 million in the U.S., so it paid its rent, which is more than most of the critics' screenplays did.

The setup is this: Joe, a janitor with a mullet and a wardrobe you could only buy at a gas station that's on fire, sweeps the floors at a radio station, and a shock jock played by Dennis Miller puts him on the air to laugh at him. Joe tells his life story. His parents left him at the Grand Canyon when he was a boy, and he has spent his life looking for them, with Christopher Walken, Kid Rock and Brittany Daniel along the way. That's a premise you could sell to a sad Russian novelist, and here it's a vehicle for a man getting hit in the head.

Here's the case for it. David Spade made his name sneering. On SNL he was the receptionist who couldn't be bothered to know your name, and in Tommy Boy he was the one rolling his eyes at Chris Farley. Joe Dirt is the only time he played the guy he'd usually make fun of, and he plays him with no wink at all. Joe is broke, ugly and lied to, and he is never once bitter about it. That's either great acting or a man who needed the money badly enough to mean it, and either way it shows.

And the movie is cannier than it looks. The real joke isn't on Joe; it's on the radio audience, who tune in to sneer at a poor man and end up rooting for him. That was 2001. A few years later, the whole of television became a shock jock laughing at a man in a mullet, and nobody learned the lesson the movie was trying to teach, which was to quit it.

The public got the joke even if the professionals didn't. A 2014 Empire piece put the audience score at 76 percent, and when Sony made Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser for its free Crackle service in 2015, it passed 2 million views in a few weeks and became the most-watched original movie Crackle ever made. Sony said that equaled a $16 million box office, a number nobody can check, which is the most honest thing a studio has ever said.

Is Joe Dirt good? Let's not go crazy; there are jokes in it a fifth grader would send back to the kitchen. But it's sweet, and in a year of mean comedies it was the one that liked its hero. Critics are like weather forecasters: they're wrong half the time, and you still feel cheated when it rains on a nice fella.