The Duke boys do shoot those arrows that explode when they hit something, and the place names are the same.

Oh, and you could almost count Willie Nelson, because he used to play with Waylon Jennings. Willie plays the new Uncle Jesse, and Waylon used be The Balladeer. But that’s about as close as it gets, and that’s also the end of the comparison. Sad, really.

There really aren’t that many other things that match up. The television series was fun without being particularly serious about much of anything – including itself. It was, quite literally, just two good old boys running around and getting into some minor trouble here and there.

With the movie version, it’s been updated with some language for the new millennium, some sexual content and the explosions have been made even bigger.

The only decent casting choice is Burt Reynolds as Boss Hogg. It’s not the same, but it’s passable. M.C. Gainey is much better on Lost – but then, it’s really too much to expect anyone to do justice to Rosco like James Best did.

In any case, the first half of the movie is simply spent tooling around Hazzard County and getting the boys locked up in Atlanta, and I was very close to just turning it off. The second half is spent in more typical fashion, breaking them out of jail, and then high-tailing it back to Hazzard just in time to win the big race and beating Rosco and Boss Hogg at his own game and save the day.

In the end, it had too much updating for my taste – but that’s likely just because the original was just so good at what it did (yes, even as bad as that may have been). Once it gets going, it’s not bad. It just takes a while to decide what it wants to do.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, crude and drug-related humor, language and comic action violence.