Stop me if you've heard this one before: There's these two buddies, right? One of them is this goofy, laid-back kind of guy who's always coming up with crazy schemes and getting into trouble. The other one is a straight-laced, uptight guy who's always trying to talk his friend out of crazy schemes but usually ends up going along with them anyway. One day, the goofy friend dreams up the craziest scheme of all, and the uptight friend protests but eventually goes along with it. The scheme goes horribly awry, but everything works out in the end, and the two friends learn valuable lessons about life in the process.
If you haven't heard that one before, you've probably never seen a buddy movie, or at least not one as blatantly formulaic as Without a Paddle. The only difference is that Paddle splits the goofy friend into two people, laid-back but semi-responsible Jerry (Matthew Lillard) and total nutjob Tom (Dax Shepard). Along with the uptight friend, Dan (Seth Green), the two attend the funeral of a childhood buddy and decide to rekindle the dream that all four had as kids: to find the money stolen by legendary fugitive D.B. Cooper.
Jerry, Tom and Dan head into the wilds of Oregon to find the treasure, following a map drawn by their dearly departed pal, and quickly become hopelessly lost and stranded. They run afoul of two pot-growing hillbillies (Ethan Suplee and Abraham Benrubi), tangle with a bear, cross paths with hot environmentalist chicks, and bond with a rugged mountain man played by Burt Reynolds, whom we all know will appear in anything. There are poop jokes. There are dick jokes. You get the idea.
It's so basic and routine that the five credited writers don't put even a modicum of effort into the story. Exposition is dumped in clunky blocks, like all they wrote was an outline for the script. It's as if somebody was telling you about a joke, rather than telling you the actual joke. Directed indifferently by a graduate of the Adam Sandler Training Academy for Moronic Comedy and acted by two spastic dweebs (Shepard, of MTV's Punk'd, and Lillard, of every bad movie ever made) and a curiously flat Green, Without a Paddle is the result of absolute minimum effort on the part of everyone involved. It should take no effort at all to completely avoid it.