Grand Theft Parsons Movie Review

The resounding message of Grand Theft Parsons, if there is one, seems to be that hicks are big on honor. Really big on honor. Apparently, a hick should honor his word to a friend in any way possible, up to and including stealing the body of a country musician from Los Angeles airport in the back of a yellow hearse with a yin-yang sign on it (and with the name of Bertha) and then taking said body to be torched in the California desert.

It’s not my place to pass judgment on the burial rights of musicians (just on the movies made about the incident), but Grand Theft Parsons has one of the most sitcom like plots I’ve seen in an impendent movie in a long time. While a studio flick have might have taken such a shtick for slapstick and made it dumbly funny, Grand Theft Parsons goes down the road of the metaphysical, using a corpse in a car as an excuse for a surreal waxing philosophical on hicks, bodies, and rock and roll.

In keeping with the cheesy metaphors, Grand Theft Parsons could try to pawn itself off as a movie that represents how directionless the rock and roll generation can be, but I doubt that’s intentional. The movie’s plot meanders like the stumbling hippie (Michael Shannon) used for comic support.

To be fair, Grand Theft Parsons has a solid cast with developed roles and quality performances. Johnny Knoxville and Christina Applegate both have relatively serious roles and don’t act like they just stepped off either the set of Jackass or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it movie about the endearing stereotypes of the sky, the sixties stewardess (Applegate, View from the Top). But simply having a good cast and a solid premise does not make a movie, and Grand Theft Parsons ends up being a sad joke without a solid punchline.