A Character From a Classic ‘80s Comedy Showed Up in a Larry the Cable Guy Bomb
When we talk about great movie comedies, seldom does the name “Larry the Cable Guy” come up. Apart from the Cars franchise, Larry the Cable Guy’s filmography is mainly limited to forgettable turds, such as Delta Farce, as well as straight-to-video sequels to movies that starred less affordable action stars.
After all, who better to replace Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Arnold Schwarzenegger than Larry the Cable Guy, star of Tooth Fairy 2 and Jingle All the Way 2.
Weirdly, one of Larry the Cable Guy’s contributions to the world of cinema straight-up used a character from an earlier, highly-acclaimed film that in no way involved Larry the Cable Guy.
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In 2008, Mr. the Cable Guy made a movie called Witless Protection, about a small-town deputy who takes off with an FBI witness, believing that the agents involved in the case are actually baddies. Amazingly, it managed to earn a 4 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. To put that in perspective, Cats has a score of 19 percent.
The movie also stars the legendary Yaphet Kotto, and the far less legendary Jenny McCarthy. Kotto plays an FBI agent named “Alonzo Mosely” in what sadly turned out to be his final film role. Reportedly he just retired, but it’s also possible that sharing scenes with the Blue Collar Comedy Tour guy totally sapped his enthusiasm for the process of filmmaking as a whole.
If that character name sounds familiar, that’s probably because there was a guy named “Alonzo Mosely” in the classic ‘80s action-comedy Midnight Run, which could just have been a coincidence, except for the fact that he was also an FBI agent, and he was also played by Yaphet Kotto.
So was Witless Protection a part of the Midnight Run Cinematic Universe?
Seemingly, the filmmakers behind this really bad movie simply decided to co-opt a character from a really good movie from the same genre, without permission. This would be kind of like if someone decided to make a low-budget mafia movie with Jeff Foxworthy, then hired Al Pacino to play “Michael Corleone.”
While the filmmakers behind Witless Protection may have been banking on the fact that nobody in the universe would ever watch Witless Protection, Universal Pictures, who released Midnight Run, took notice of the name and filed a lawsuit against the distributor, Lionsgate. Universal claimed that Lionsgate had already been “warned with a cease-and-desist letter concerning the Mosely character” and were seeking to “impound and dispose of all copies of the film.” They also wanted “all profits, should any exist.” The court papers even managed to throw some shade at Witless Protection, making reference to the movie’s “inane action” and noting that it was a “box office flop as well as a critical failure.”
Presumably, Universal either lost the case or reached some sort of settlement with Lionsgate, seeing as how the studio has never gone door-to-door confiscating Witless Protection DVDs.
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