[5.6/10] Ah, the films you watch while at a friend’s house. Here is the best thing you can say about *Major Payne* -- it knows exactly what it is. It is a big, broad, loud, dumb movie that makes no bones about that fact. If you are looking for clever comedy, well-developed characters, or anything but the lowest common denominator, you are barking up the wrong tree. But if you want a self-consciously stupid comedy, that dutifully goes through the standard brush strokes of this paint-by-numbers yukfest without any pretense, then you’ve come to the right place.

*Major Payne* stars Damon Wayans as the title character, a cartoonishly hardcore soldier who loves killing, dummied out of the military after failing to attain a promotion in the requisite amount of time, who finds the closest thing to life in the armed forces he can find in the civilian world is leading an ROTC program at a Virginia school. As a character, Major Payne feels like he sprung forth from a sketch from one of Damon’s stops at *SNL* or *In Living Color*. He is broad, with a one-note characteristic, a silly voice, and a trademark catchphrase or quirk.

To that end, *Major Payne* runs into the sorts of problems that most sketch character turned feature film character movies do. The sort of over-exaggerated characteristics that can carry a three-minute skit are not enough to sustain a ninety-minute movie. The rest of the character who populate the film are thinly-drawn and basically only exist to advance the main character’s story. And Damon’s exaggerated voice for the character becomes more and more grating and ridiculous the longer the movie goes on (which, if you’ve seen *Bamboozled*, confirms that Damon is fully capable of dragging down a film with a terrible choice for how to realize a character vocally).

The film proceeds as you would expect. (Fair warning, there are spoilers from here on out, though if you have half a brain, you can predict where *Major Payne* is going to go within the first fifteen minutes. Payne meets his ragtag group of recruits who are initially inept and resentful of his leadership, but eventually band together, see him as a father figure, and resolve (through the magic of montage) to earn his respect by winning the Virginia Military Games. The hard-nosed Payne eventually softens to care about his recruits, particularly the rebellious Alex Stone (who’s playing 16 and looks 32) and diminutive moppet orphan, Tiger.

The worst part of this predictability comes in the form of Karyn Parsons playing his love interest, Emily Walburn, a fellow teacher who encourages Payne to soften his approach. Walburn is the standard issue one-dimensional female accessory to the male lead. She’s somehow simultaneously a scold and yet endlessly patient with Payne’s awful “teaching method” and turns from being aghast at Payne’s methods to being in love with him at the drop of a hat. The half-baked love story is one of the sorriest parts of the movie, despite a winning performance from Parsons in a role beneath her talents.

That’s the odd thing about *Major Payne*, it’s a well-directed, well-shot film with a good amount of talent involved. Parsons brings enough charisma to solidify a barely-written role for her in the story. Wayans, for all the lameness of the character he crafts, has the sort of comic timing to make bits that hardly even qualify as jokes land with the right change of expression. Even the kids, who are a collection of props and stereotypes as they play their junior version of *Stripes*, play well off one another.

The film is also surprisingly effective at delivering comedy and intention through the visual grammar it uses and the score. Bits like the cadets replacing Major Payne’s cupcake with one covered in laxative frosting (which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the level of humor in this film) get by with expert editing and scoring that makes the rhythm of the scene funny even if the premise of it isn’t. By the same token, the scenes where Walburn steps in front of a marching Payne in both directions is a nice use of blocking to contrast the characters’ personalities. And even the relay race and marching segments of the military games at the end of the movie create tension and fun despite the foregone conclusion of how things will turn out.

*Major Payne* may have a dud of a script, an annoying central character, and a third grade sense of humor, but it’s a soundly-crafted film. Director Nick Castle (who, oddly enough, played Michael Meyers in the first *Halloween* movie, ensures that if he’s going to produce crap, it’s going to be well made crap.

Despite my dumping on the script, it can be credited for its clarity. While the plot and character arcs are simple and predictable and at times insulting to your intelligence, *Major Payne* sets up everything it knocks down, from the cadets’ reasons for caring about winning the games, to Alex Stone’s daddy issues, to Payne’s own learning to soften his method at Walburn’s behest. The execution of it is hackneyed as all get out, but the story is, at a minimum, surefooted in its causes and effects, however cliché those may be.

The biggest problem with *Major Payne* is its humor. While some of the jokes are worth a mild chuckle here and there, on the whole they are as juvenile and sophomoric as anything you scribbled in a middle school notebook. I’m not above enjoying scatological or self-consciously dumb humor, but there’s zero cleverness to the gags *Major Payne* puts together, just a parade of easy insults, grown-ups calling kids “turds” and making fun of their disabilities as the whole joke, and generally aiming for laughs from the cheap seats. While *Payne* can occasionally muster some scruffy charm from its broad sense of humor, for the most part all it generates are eye-rolls.

But again, at least it’s a film that knows what it is. *Major Payne*, with its tepid references to *Apocalypse Now* and *Full Metal Jacket*, isn’t aiming to be like these films, or even convincing parodies of this films. It’s an excuse for a standard-issue comic tale, dressed up in the trappings of the military, going for the easiest laughs it can find every time in a full-throated, unabashed manner. That may not be my cup of tea, but I can at least appreciate *Major Payne* for having a mission, however cheap or misguided, and fulfilling it without compunction. It’s not a good film, but it absolutely achieves what it sets out to do, and that’s not nothing.