review for Dude, Where's My Car? on AllMovie

A shameless effort to ape the style and success of the films of screenwriter Ed Solomon, this calculatedly dumb teenage comedy rips off the writer's best work, such as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and Men in Black (1997) with gleeful abandon. Whether it's the afterlife or a secret government organization policing alien visitors, much of the humor and appeal of Solomon's work is its creation of entire worlds and systems adhering to his own trippy, far-out logic. Dude, Where's My Car? only scratches the surface of such invention, focusing its attention instead on the drug-abusing slackers at its center, mining laughs from their stoned reactions to the various caricatures they encounter. Director Danny Leiner and writer Philip Stark manage to whip up a few genuine laughs here and there, but their sense of humor is as derivative as their anecdotal script and as dated as their film's soundtrack.