The Broken Lizard guys — Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske — have made a career out of doing “stupid” big, knowing and affable, as in Super Troopers and Beerfest. While not huge breakout stars by any means, they’ve built up a reputation as “fratire” trailblazers, cinematic forerunners for Tucker Max. Their best effort, however, was probably the island-set murder mystery send-up Club Dread, and not merely because Brittany Daniel runs around in a bikini for most of the film, and they got the beautiful Jordan Ladd to go topless. No, that flick had a rooted story around which the jokes were all built. Their latest effort has a lot of what makes their movies of a piece (left-field humor like coleslaw down the pants and a swordfish being punched unconscious), but The Slammin’ Salmon, despite its vaguely sexual title, is a decent comedic premise only fitfully delivered upon.

Set in Miami, the movie centers around the wait staff at a pricey restaurant owned by “Slammin’ Cleon Salmon” (Michael Clarke Duncan), a former heavyweight boxing champion with a penchant for the gregarious mangling of words and the bellowing of “Whatever, motherfucker!” when someone deigns to correct him (which isn’t very often). Having racked up a $20,000 gambling debt to a group of thugs after placing bets on and taking part in catch-and-release Japanese albino hunting (yes, seriously), cash-poor Cleon challenges issues a contest ultimatum to his oddball staff via bumbling, nice-guy manager Rich (Heffernan): to turn over $20,000 sales in a single night, with the top-selling server winning a huge prize and the last-place
server getting a broken-rib sandwich. Preening Guy (Stolhanske), borderline multiple personality screwball “Nuts” (Chandrasekhar), med student Tara (Cobie Smulders), new guy Donnie (Soter), would-be ballerina Mia (April Bowlby) and disgraced actor Connor (Lemme), returning from an abortive television gig, have at it. Spurred on by greed and panic, the staff resorts to backstabbing, bribery and all sorts of indecent proposals in wheels-spinning attempts to “up-sell” patrons.

There’s enough basic structure in place for The Slammin’ Salmon to be amusing, but too large a portion of its jokes and banter feel like first-draft placeholder material, and its consistently scattershot staging and execution too often undercuts whatever comedic momentum it starts to accrue. It’s tough to really pull off comedies confined to a single space and time — the choreography has to be crackerjack, and mindful of how one screw-up or interruption or delay impacts everything around it (think Noises Off, when properly staged), which just isn’t the case here. The Broken Lizard guys go mostly big, obviously, but several of these story strands of wild escalation (Rich’s accidental ingestion of a customer’s diamond engagement ring, for instance, after gluttonously attacking a dessert momentarily left in the “send-back”
area) get left behind, or back-burned in ways that make them a lot less amusing when they return to them. The madcap tone and energy isn’t slowly and believably ratcheted up, in other words. Still, the Broken Lizard guys call in enough favors to fill out supporting roles with recognizable faces, as Will Forte, Olivia Munn, Vivica A. Fox, Morgan Fairchild, Lance Henriksen, Sendahil Ramamurthy and Jim Gaffigan all appear in bit parts.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, The Slammin’ Salmon comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Supplemental features are anchored by two separate audio commentary tracks with the Broken Lizard gang; one features Chandrasekhar, Stolhanske and Soter, the other features Heffernan and Lemme. Both unexpectedly suffer a bit from lapses in engagement, but the latter track is the livelier affair, with anecdotes about farting contests between key grips, and Heffernan pointing out a couple bits in the movie’s finale that are copped from Rocky III, from the LeRoy Neiman-inspired painting done by his brother, an artist, to his commissioned choice for a closing credits song, Earth Cock’s “Cry of the Cougar,” that is a straight-up rip-off of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” The only other bonus tidbit is a seven-minute featurette, “Hellish Kitchens: Art Imitates Restaurant Life,” that features the Broken Lizard gang reminiscing about old food service employment, shared and otherwise, all while apparently riding to set together in a noisy van. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C (Disc)