Infamous Director’s Extremely R-Rated Action Comedy Succeeds In Offending Absolutely Everybody 

By Robert Scucci
| Published 13 seconds ago

Growing up, we all had that one edgelord friend who would say the most offensive things possible whenever the opportunity presented itself. Their entire goal is to clear the room with the things they say and do, and when you grow up, you start distancing yourself from this kind of person for reasons that don’t really require much justification. You don’t want somebody like this showing up to your job and getting you fired, or saying the wrong thing in front of your significant other because the tradeoff for their perpetually tasteless humor is sleeping on the front lawn.

If you’re looking for that guy in movie form so you can get your fill without having your life ruined, you can find it in Uwe Boll’s action comedy disasterpiece, Postal (2007), which, in my opinion, is grossly misunderstood and severely underappreciated.

Don’t get this twisted, Postal is problematic, reprehensible even, and that’s the entire point. But for some reason, this doesn’t come off like an edgelord being offensive just to get a rise out of people, like 2013’s InAPPropriate Comedy. This is Boll adapting yet another video game series to film, but instead of taking himself seriously and failing miserably like he did with films like Alone in the Dark (2005) or BloodRayne (2005), he leaned into camp, egregiously offensive humor, and total chaos instead.

I’m here to argue, however, that he didn’t fail miserably, despite what the nine-percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes would lead you to believe.

Postal Is Built Differently

Postal kicks off with a recreation of the September 11 attacks and somehow manages to get exponentially worse across its 100-minute runtime (114 minutes if you can secure a copy of the director’s cut). From there, we’re introduced to our protagonist, simply billed as The Postal Dude (Zack Ward), five years later. The Postal Dude lives in a dilapidated trailer home in Paradise, Arizona with his morbidly obese, emotionally abusive, cheating and thieving girlfriend, simply billed as B**** (Jodie Stewart). He’s looking to leave Paradise, and start his life over, because his present situation is hardly doing him any favors. 

Now, you may be wondering what the opening sequence has to do with The Postal Dude’s character arc, but it all starts to make sense when he’s contacted by his Uncle Dave (Dave Foley), the leader of a religious death cult that owes the IRS over a million dollars in back taxes. Dave recruits The Postal Dude to run a scam involving a missing shipment of plush toys known as Krotchy Dolls, whose likeness resembles the exact pieces of male anatomy that they sound like. Basically, Dave wants Postal Dude to use a mail truck to locate and secure the missing dolls so they can sell them online for money. That’s the entire plan. That’s as far as they think it through before acting on it.

Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden (Larry Thomas) and his network of terrorists, who all just so happen to operate out of Paradise, Arizona, are also trying to secure the Krotchy dolls, but for a far more nefarious reason. Instead of flipping them for a quick profit, they want to infect them with a rare strain of bird flu, resulting in a nationwide pandemic when unsuspecting children play with the dolls after they’re distributed all over the country. Unbeknownst to Dave, his right-hand man Richie (Chris Coppola) is on the terrorists’ side because the fictional bible Dave wrote includes a prophecy about the end of days, which Richie takes literally and wants to help facilitate.

Along the way, The Postal Dude befriends a barista named Faith (Jackie Tohn) and a bunch of other smokin’ hot babes in miniskirts and bikinis who all conveniently know how to use machine guns. They join forces and rack up an absurd body count, sparing nobody in their pursuit of shutting down Al-Qaeda and restoring peace, resulting in an unthinkable amount of collateral damage, bloodshed, and dead bodies.

The Most Tasteless Movie Of The 2000s

Listen, you need to be a very special kind of person to enjoy movies like Postal. I’m not saying it’s not in poor taste or bad faith because it absolutely is. What sets it apart from other “offensive” comedies, though, is its fearless commitment to the bit. So much so that every joke lands when you consider the source material, who’s directing it, and what it’s trying to accomplish.

Every single character in Postal is reprehensible, and that’s the point. Personally, I’m willing to forgive everything everybody says and does in this movie because it’s a movie, but also because everybody rightfully gets what’s coming to them, and they all deserve it. Postal has to go all in because if it didn’t, none of it would feel earned.

Uwe Boll, who’s notorious for his love of filmmaking despite his complete ineptitude as a filmmaker, was originally asked by Vince Desi­derio, the CEO of Running With Scissors, the studio responsible for the Postal video game series, to come up with a much darker, grittier adaptation. He rejected the pitch and instead decided to lean fully into camp, satire, extreme violence, and offensive humor to get his point across.

I think this was the right move because the video game series, which also aims to be as politically incorrect as possible, benefits from being turned into a slapstick endeavor thanks to Boll’s writing and direction. If you still have that edgelord friend who you just can’t seem to quit, this movie is tailored to their sense of humor while simultaneously undermining it every step of the way, almost as if to say, “Yeah, this is funny, and you can laugh at it, but we’re also laughing at you.”

Postal succeeds in offending every single sensibility you could imagine, and it does so unapologetically. Like most Uwe Boll efforts, it’s built differently and truly a sample size of one. Objectively speaking, it’s not a great film. But since I assess most things I watch based on whether execution meets intention, I’ve got to say “job well done” here. Boll accomplished exactly what he set out to do here, whether you like it or not. 

Postal is “one of the movies of all time,” and can currently be streamed on Tubi for free in all of its disgusting, offensive, and stupid glory.