Sara Vilkomerson's Guide To This Week's Movies: Please Return Postal to Sender

No surprise that The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian took the No. 1 spot away from the mighty Iron Man last weekend. But the sequel didn’t gross nearly as much as box office forecasters (and Disney) had expected, pulling in just over $56 million. Still, we’re guessing Narnia’s reign will be brief: Our old pal Indy is back this weekend with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. As much as we fear this might cement Shia LeBeouf as serious A-lister (a long way from Project Greenlight, baby), hooray for the return of Karen Allen!

UNFORTUNATELY, THIS WEEKEND also brings Uwe Boll’s Postal, described as an “over-the-top and hilariously subversive critique of modern day America.” A few days ago, The New York Times devoted over 1,500 words explaining why the German Mr. Boll—whose best-known movies (Bloodrayne, anyone?) are based on video games—is the most despised director around thanks to his unspeakably tasteless films. And yet, even with the preparation, we were shocked by how crass Postal is. The plot (if you can call it that) revolves around a mild-mannered man (Zack Ward) who becomes involved in a plan with his religious charlatan uncle (played by Dave Foley, of Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio fame) to steal a valuable shipment of “Krochy” dolls and somehow ends up facing an underground cell of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in a Nazi-themed amusement park. In the first 15 minutes, there is a 9/11 parody that involves two hijackers fighting about the number of afterlife virgins promised to them, and Mr. Foley (Oh, Dave Foley! What are you doing in this movie?) keeps up the current tradition of full-frontal male nudity when he appears naked, taking a noisy dump. Yuck. And that’s nothing compared to what follows—Holocaust jokes (in “Little Germany,” where you can pay using gold teeth), a cat having a gun shoved up its rear end and used as a silencer and … do we need to go on? Mr. Boll seems to delight in being as controversial as possible, so we kind of hate that we are taking the bait. In the Times article, Mr. Foley compared Mr. Boll to Andy Kaufman. We wish we could rise above our admittedly bourgeois sensibilities to recognize something subversive and genius in Postal. But, actually? No, we don’t.

Postal opens Friday at Cobble Hill Cinema in Brooklyn.