Telegraph, other than being a major street in the town of which I reside, is a term often used in sports when one athlete is letting another athlete know that something is coming.  If a football Quarterback is telegraphing his passes, then there’s a good chance the defensive back is going to intercept it.  If a boxer is telegraphing his punches, then his opponent will easily be able to counter those punches and knock his ass out.  Movies telegraph stuff all of the time to.  You pretty much know that the boy is going to get the girl or that the hero is going clip the red wire right before the L.E.D. counts down to triple zero, and we accept this because hopefully getting to that point was entertaining.  A comedy telegraphing its jokes however is not a good thing.  Because if you know the punch line to a joke before that joke is finished, then that joke won’t be funny now will it?  Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engvall are two cats from the Blue Collar comedy tour and I’ve seen their acts and those dudes are pretty funny, but this movie that they’re in, ‘Delta Farce’, is the anti-funny.  I hope this movie isn’t supposed to be geared towards the blue collar working demographic because if it is, then the producers of this thing think that demographic is stupid as hell.

Larry the Cable guy plays Larry and Bill Engvall plays Bill.  Yeah, they definitely think this demographic is stupid as hell.  Along with their third buddy Everett (DJ Qualls), they form a once a month rag tag regimen of reservist who go off in the woods of Georgia and do some huntin’ and fishin’.  The war in Iraq is heating up though – I’m thinking maybe wars should be over before make comedies about them, but that’s just me thinking out loud – and the powers that be need to activate some reservist and send them on to Fallujah to do some insurgent killing.  The gubment has dispatched super duper hard ass army sergeant Kilgore (Keith David) to bring these three rag tag recruits up to snuff and get them ready to head to Iraq.

Now with our three heroes on the C10 to Iraq, they aren’t digging the seating arrangements to much.  I’ve ridden on C10’s and those big nets they sit you on do kind of suck.  Anyway, our three idiots proceed to the cargo hold and decide to sleep out in a Humvee.  A weather incident forces the pilots to dump cargo which includes our heroes and their Sergeant and lands them in the middle of a desert which they think is Iraq, but is actually Mexico.  Finding their sergeant unconscious, they bury him thinking he’s dead and head off to free Mexico from insurgents.  It sounds funny in theory, but was lacking in execution.  Our heroes engage a gang of banditos lead by Danny Trejo playing a Mexican named Carlos Santana (Har, har har!) and mad cap hilarity ensues which includes Mexican jokes, gay jokes, piss drinking, chaw spit eating, and men in dresses will soon follow.

We have established that telegraphing your jokes is bad, right?  So when the character of Everett pisses in his canteen, with the logic being that drinking your own urine will stave off dehydration, but he forgets said canteen and leaves it behind, we also know that when sarge comes to, he will drink that piss and as such it’s not funny.  When our heroes stumble across a mural of Poncho Villa and Hero 1 remarks it looks like Achmed from the quickie mart and hero two responds with 'only an idiot would think that', we know that hero three wills stumble along and say ‘Hey, that looks like Achmed from the quicke mart’ and as such it won’t be funny.  That was pretty much the way the whole movie went from the very beginning to very end and it was either the result of some of the laziest screenwriting in the history of movies, or the brains behind this venture seriously thought that their audience wasn’t going to see this stuff coming from a mile away.  It was also fairly offensive, I mean I’ll let my Mexican brothers be the final word on this but when a comedian tells a joke in front of a Mexican audience such as ‘Why were there only 3,000 Mexican soldiers at the Alamo?’, ‘Because they only had four pickups’.  Is that supposed to be funny?  But if my Mexican brothers are cool with that then I’m cool with that.

There was the occasional soft chuckle to be had in ‘Delta Farce’ but unfortunately they were too far and too few between.  I went in the viewing hoping for an ‘Airplane’ spoofing good time and left with a ‘Date Movie’ style bore.  Okay, not as bad as ‘Date Movie’ but only a little bit funnier than an episode of ‘Forensic Files’.