This absurdly popular South African comedy offers little more than a gentle slapstick poke at civilization, following a chance encounter by an innocent Kalahari bushman with an empty Coca Cola bottle tossed from an airplane window. Believing it to be property of the Gods, he decides to walk "to the edge of the world" and throw the mystic talisman off, encountering along the way enough subplots to fill three separate films. Director Jamie Uys isn't above getting laughs by having his characters slip on banana peels, but elsewhere he shows a fertile comic imagination, even if his ideas are occasionally spoiled by crippling miscalculations: silly, speeded up photography; poor dubbing; a TV sit-com music score; and irrelevant voice-over narration, constantly belaboring the obvious. But it's a difficult film to dislike: the jokes are too good-natured, and the large cast of characters all too well equipped with human frailties.
Review of The Gods Must Be Crazy
