‘The Pest’ A Dud With A Few Surprises Thrown In

“The Pest” is a mess. What else would you call an attempt to fuse a left-of-center social satire with a “Dumb and Dumber” vulgarian slapstick mentality?

The frenzy runs deeper yet: That distant rumbling you hear is Joseph Connell, rotating in the grave over what has been done here to his famous story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” Jeffrey Jones plays a laughably fanatical neo-Nazi hunter; John Leguizamo is the annoying human prey, nicknamed “Pest.”

To call “The Pest” a “star vehicle” for Leguizamo is an understatement. The brilliant actor has the film in a stranglehold from the opening scene and continues to throttle it until any pep the script might have had is gone.

Leguizamo seems to have started out on solid footing: What if, in some remake of that often-filmed “Most Dangerous Game,” the hunter were a white supremacist seeking to bag a specimen of every ethnic group? But David Bar Katz’s screenplay first underemphasizes the huntsman’s quest for a specifically Latino victim - and then overemphasizes the point with a demeaning term for “Hispanic.”

At least Leguizamo tries to offend across-the-board. His dash for safety, impeded by a blatantly “sissy” character (Edoardo Ballerini), proves so unsuspenseful that Leguizamo has plenty of time to ridicule Japanese businessmen, Orthodox Jews, African-Americans and so forth. Finally, the hunter forces Leguizamo out into the open, only to be thwarted by…

But that would be telling, and even a dud movie deserves to spring its surprises in its own good time.

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“THE PEST” Locations: Lincoln Heights, North Diviison and Showbaot cinemas Credits: Directed Paul Miller, starring John Leguizamo, Jeffrey Jones Running time: 1:24 Rating: PG-13