"An American Carol": Hollywood conservatives have a turn

One hundred and sixty-five years after Charles Dickens called for civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity with "A Christmas Carol," Hollywood's most rabid conservatives have rallied to make "An American Carol," a comedy that equates dissent with "treason," that presents Bill O'Reilly as a model of political restraint and offers us Kelsey Grammer as the ghost of General George S. Patton.

Yeah, when I think "Blood and Guts," I think Frasier.

David Zucker, of the "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun" movies, trots out Leslie Nielsen as a grandpa telling a tale about a Michael Moore-like "Scrooge" who wanted to ban the Fourth of July holiday. A liberal who "hates America" — and is, by the way, "fat" — is visited by the ghosts of John F. Kennedy, Patton, George Washington (Jon Voight) and the Angel of Death (Trace Adkins, who's no Toby Keith), sees the error of his ways and promises to always keep the Fourth, forever more.

It's a polemic, a screed, a combination comic rant and sentimental flag-waver that doesn't work as either. Start with the casting of Chris Farley's singularly unfunny brother Kevin as Michael Malone.

The joke-o-matic Zucker uses here lands the odd giggle — about country music, Scientology, documentaries and those silly, silly Islamic terrorists. Here, they're led by Robert Davi and a very bad hairpiece, conspiring to wreak some fresh havoc on an America too busy protecting its civil liberties to remember we're at war.

Malone, maker of such documentary hits as "Die You American Pigs," visits a South where no Civil War freed the slaves, He hears the Yankee-accented Washington lecture him about "freedom of speech, which you abuse." And he endures lots of fat jokes and small children calling him obscene names. Funny.

It's a mean little mess of a movie, pandering of the most cynical kind. Zucker, who converted his own politics in 2004, is playing to the suckers in a grand faux redneck tradition.