Steve Barker (Johnny Knoxville) goes to his boss to ask for a promotion. His first job is to fire the janitor Stavi. He can't bring himself to do it and instead hires him to mow his lawn. Stavi accidentally cuts off his finger and Steve needs $28k to get it reattached. His sleazy uncle Gary (Brian Cox) comes up with the idea to fix the Special Olympics. Gary wants him to pose as mentally challenged to beat the pentathlon champ Jimmy Washington. He falls for event organizer Lynn Sheridan (Katherine Heigl).

The start is pretty weak with a wishywashy lead character. I don't think Knoxville is particularly good at playing that character. Katherine Heigl is fairly wooden in this. Knoxville pretending to be slow is par for the course for most of his movies. None of these problems mean the end of the world. I actually like the real handicap actors in this. The biggest problem I have are all the actors acting as mentally handicap. It feels demeaning and fake. Unless they are trying to be Dustin Hoffman doing Rain Man, this was never going to work. They are better off simply getting real handicap actors to do the roles. Even if they can't quite say the lines, they could concentrate the acting to the few that seem to do good work. It's kind of insulting. It's uncomfortable. It's not funny. I just keep thinking that Knoxville is suppose to be stupid and funny for faking a mental handicap. Yet there are all these other actors who are actually faking mental handicap and the audience has to take them seriously.

If you have high hopes for a film starring Johnny Knoxville that centers around rigging the Special Olympics, you are either very strange or are way too naive (or both). The film has one joke (that mentally handicapped people are funny to watch) and uses it over and over again. Which is amusing most of the time, but more often than not seems to only secure my seat on the bus ride to hell.

There is nothing new in this film. The cliché of a man entering a group he finds inferior only to discover they are no less human? It's here. The man who falls in love with a woman but is lying to her about his identity the whole time? Oh yeah, that, too. I could parallel this film with about a dozen off the top of my head, so whoever wrote this certainly was not trying to break any new ground. (Even the premise - rigging the Olympics - had been a South Park episode.) For what it's worth, Johnny Knoxville did a fine job. Trying to imagine him being retarded is not much of a stretch, though he certainly is very good at physical comedy and has no reservations in injuring himself for a laugh. The female lead (Katherine Heigl?) seems to serve no other purpose than to be attractive and not overly bright prospect of the main character. If that was her purpose, she hit the mark.

For some cheap laughs, you might want to see this film. But it's not one you want to put as a high priority on your Netflix queue.

The only other film I saw the main star in, after the success and end of Jackass, was Men in Black II, and this role isn't too bad either. Johnny Knoxville as Steve Barker is tempted by his Uncle to fix the Special Olympics to help his friend who lost his fingers, and make other money. The mentally challenged identity he chooses is "Jeffy" who likes apples, and one of the managers, Karen (Janna Ambort) believes it till the end. He manages to fool everyone till about the middle when all the other competitors, besides the main winner, find out his lie. They do keep up the act though and say he can try and beat the main winner. Also starring Brian Cox as Gary Barker, Katherine Heigl as Lynn Sheridan, Bill Chott as Thomas, Mohammad Ahmed as Dr. Ahmed, Geoffrey Arend as Winston, Luis Avalos as Stavi, Edward Barbanell as Billy, Johnny Bartee as Stadium Spectator, Nicole E. Bradley as Yolie and Heidi B. Bush as Heidi. The highlight for me, and the point where you think he should have chosen another identity, is when he acts characters in the mirror. Worth watching!