Starring: Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson (I)

4 out of 10 stars: One can say this about the makers of The Dukes of Hazzard, they kept the fans happy.

Very little, save a bigger budget and a different cast, has been changed from the original CBS show. The 1979-1985 The Dukes of Hazzard was essentially a serialized Hee-Haw and the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree (which would make today's MTV and CMT "Hee-Haw" in this analogy). There's two rakish Duke boys, one hotsty-totsy Duke cousin (Daisy), a Waylon Jennings-sounding narrator (the late country musician voiced all the episodes of the TV show), a Boss Hog, a Cooter, an Uncle Jesse, a Roscoe, there's even an Enos. The movie has very few pretensions of appealing to anyone outside of its core demographic and it's evident the filmmakers have taken great pains to give their audience exactly what they assumed they wanted.

Unlike Bewitched though, which attempted an entirely different take on its source material, and ended up one of the worst movies of the year, when Dukes strays from its format it finally manages to inject some humor, and some sense of the "thrill-billy" that it claims to be about. One even catches a faint whiff of the great Smokey and the Bandit at times, though it's fleeting.

Mostly Dukes is about burnin' rubber, drinkin', fightin', and lovin' in a sanitized format. Of course, the irony there is that the cleanup takes a lot of the fun out of the drinkin', fightin', and lovin' in the process, but this is, let's say it, a Wal-Mart movie. It's naughty but no nipple, it's drinking but not drunk, it's fighting but not hitting. It's the hint of sin, not the execution.

In a movie about moonshine runners, who bed half the residents of a Georgia county, that's quite an accomplishment.

Luke Duke Johnny Knoxville has done most of the bedding while his cousin, Bo (Seann William Scott) is more interested in buffing his car, the General Lee. They use Lee to transport their Uncle Jesse's (Willy Nelson) moonshine (which must really be cut-rate swill) to the local farmers. The choice operator of Jesse's still is Daisy Duke (Jessica Simpson). The Duke boys are the thorn in the side of Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds, looking more and more like Katherine Helmond's character in Brazil with each outing). Hogg has the entire Hazzard county police force on his side including the mean Roscoe P. Coltrane (M.C. Gainey) and the inept Deputy Enos Strate (Michael Wilson).

Boss Hogg intends to get an approval to strip mine most of Hazzard County but he has to go through the court and an approval process to do so. To ensure that no one objects during the hearing he brings a favorite son, stock car driver Billy Prickett (James Roday) into town to race. Figuring everyone will attend the race he only needs to keep the Dukes away from the courthouse, as he's seized their land on trumped up charges.

To figure out Boss Hogg's plan the cousins have to break into his barbed wire construction compound, steal his safe, steal the core samples from the safe, travel to Atlanta to inspect the core samples, and evade everyone in Atlanta who has a problem with the Confederate Flag painted on top of the General Lee. The flag, which was a hotly contested "will they or won't they" topic before the film was made, turns out to provide some of the most earnest laughs in the film. Stuck in traffic the Dukes, who are unaware that they have the flag on the roof, get an earful from the cars passing by them as people react to it.

The Atlanta section, which also includes a pretty funny visit to a sorority, is the least like the original television show and the only consistently entertaining section. It also has an appearance by the director Jay Chandrasekhar, a member of the comedy troupe, Broken Lizard, who made the very humorous Super Troopers, a movie a heck of a lot more inventive and daring than this thing. Chandrasekhar also brings with him from Lizard Kevin Heffernan as Skeev, an armadillo-wearing munitions expert. One tends to need a munitions expert in a movie like this.

Chandrasekhar doesn't have the good-ol'-boy touch of a Hal Needham, or the brute, orgiastic, slapstick force of a John Landis, but he doesn't really need to. He's merely got to get from Point A to Point B to Point C.

Jessica Simpson is Chandrasekhar's Point B for a good portion of Dukes. She's not expected to do much, she actually does more in the "These Boots Were Made for Walkin'" video where she bumps and grinds like a lapdancer (what does it say when she can get away with stuff in a video she can't get away with in a PG-13 movie?). I keep expecting Jessica Simpson to admit she's doing all this to pay her way through college, or because she's got a kid at home.

The Duke boys are both enjoyable. Seann William Scott continues to get better, perfecting a persona that should keep him employed for years. His ability to mix vulnerability (Bo passes out and becomes unintelligible when he meets his high school crush), braggadocio (he puts on a crash helmet for a bar fight) and just plain craziness (he looks like he would jump a bridge in a Charger) make for an action star that can carry more than the action scenes.

Knoxville too has a roguish charm though he's relegated to the romantic lead. One wants to see him a more active, action role. If these two don't hate each other they'd make a great team in something other than a remake of TV show that not that many people liked in the first place.