“The Slammin’ Salmon” (Directed by Kevin Heffernan, 2009)

“The Slammin’ Salmon” is a comedy revolving around a wait staff at a Miami restaurant owned by a former championship boxer. The boxer’s name is Cleon Salmon (played by Michael Clarke Duncan) hence the name of both the restaurant and the movie, and fittingly the restaurant serves seafood. This movie is produced by and stars the same group that created “Super Troopers” and “Beerfest”, and it barely lives up to even those low standards of quality. The jokes are often vulgar, the plot inexplicable, and laughs are hard to come by.
The vulgarity in this movie is constant. In the first few scenes Jay Chandrasekhar’s character Nutz has to clarify for his peer that he was joking when he said he, “made sweet hot love to an orangutan.” While crude humor like this can sometimes get big laughs, here it falls flat partly because of poor delivery, and partly because its just not a funny joke. That seems to be the problem with most of the jokes in the movie. They just do not incite much laughter, and the viewer is often left just trying to understand what the joke was supposed to mean. Duncan’s character’s favorite line in the movie is to tell whomever he’s chastising that he’ll shove, “blank up your ass!” He tells his employees that he will shove entire people up their asses, and even goes so far as to threaten an employee that he will, “shove your own ass up your ass!”
The story in this film makes just as little sense as the majority of the jokes. The crux of the plot is that Salmon is desperate for the restaurant to make $20,000 (more than they’ve ever made in one night) and will go to any lengths to motivate his wait staff to get it done. Even though the reason for the desperation is clearly statedProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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0(Duncan’s character owes the yakuza $20,000 for a debt from gambling on Japanese albino hunting and he is currently cash strapped) it still seems completely inexplicable. Furthermore, his method of motivation is nonsense as well. He first offers Norah Jones tickets to the top seller of the night. When that barely gets anyone jumping to sell fish, he ups it to a 4-day spa vacation, and eventually in desperation ups the prize to $10,000 cash for the best waiter. Why would someone who needs $20,000 offer $10,000? It might be a joke but it is not funny.
This prize pot does the trick and for the rest of the film the wait staff is shown running around the restaurant like lunatics trying to sell the most seafood. While this war is waged the predictable gross food service jokes come a mile a minute, and usually miss the mark. Pass on this one, it’s a little undercooked.