As the corrupt Georgia commissioner, Boss Hogg, in the movie version of "The Dukes of Hazzard," Burt Reynolds wears cream-colored three-piece suits that match his teeth. His hair is a shiny silver pelt, and he won't enter a scene unless he can walk off with it.

The movie, sadly, lets him down. There's nothing to steal. "The Dukes of Hazzard" is a cheap, greasy time at the multiplex. You leave annoyed at having been hungry enough to have ever wanted it in the first place.

The film remains faithful to the gamboling spirit of the series. But Jessica Simpson's bodacious contributions notwithstanding, there's just no body. Cousins and moonshine couriers Bo and Luke (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) race from one vehicular pileup to the next, in the name of stopping Boss Hogg from razing their Uncle Jesse's farm to build a strip mine for coal.

Hogg's scheme manages to rope in a famous homegrown stock car racer who's too good for Hazzard. And it affords the boys a trip to a college campus, which had been like kryptonite to them. Then Luke gets a gander at some of the co-eds.

Simpson, the singer and reality-television wife, plays Daisy Duke, the cousin who's always bailing the boys out of trouble. She acknowledges that her resources are simultaneously ample and limited. Bo and Luke will surely get themselves locked up, "and I'm gonna have to wag my [butt] to get them out," she complains with refreshing awareness.

The movie lets her be as canny as Catherine Bach was in the original show, yet she's still just a tease for the horndogs on the set and in the audience. Her wiles consist of walking up to men in her eponymous short-shorts. Simpson has legs for weeks, and while this is hardly the occasion to evaluate her craft as an actor, she does give her scenes a charge that the movie can't sustain. Every time she knocks our hair back, the film abruptly moves on.

Screenwriter John O'Brien and director Jay Chandrasekhar attempt to bring the Dukes into the 21st century, but their efforts don't pan out. When Bo and Luke leave their backwoods county for Atlanta, they're given grief over the Confederate flag painted on the roof of their car, the General Lee. But the boys' encounters with a house full of randy sorority girls, annoyed African-Americans, and a college science lab just confirm that they're brainless, live-action cartoons. (Though Luke teaches us that the politically correct term for "redneck hillbilly" is "Appalachian American.")

O'Brien was a writer of last year's "Starsky & Hutch," which was a gas because it shrewdly, if crudely, had fun not merely with the premise of the TV series but with the essence of its era. The filmmakers transformed a serious cop show into a wall-to-wall work of kitsch. "The Dukes of Hazzard," by comparison, just feels like an extended lost episode of the original show. (As Uncle Jesse, Willie Nelson does get to revel in his unabashed love for weed, and it's a funny moment that comes far too late in the action.)

The real trouble is that the movie can't determine what type of dumb it would like to be. Raucous? Juvenile? Ironic and knowingly dumb? Is it good-natured? Mean? With bigger or more interesting stars on display, these aren't questions you'd be forced to ask. But Scott and Knoxville are crash-test dummies. They both have stick-on accents, and Scott spends half the movie in a regionally inappropriate Led Zeppelin T-shirt that should have won him a black eye from an Allman brother. His idiot shtick has its amusements, which surface whenever the movie throws a girl in his way. But it's not enough to wrest "The Dukes of Hazzard" from mediocrity.

This is a movie crying out for actors to bend the proceedings to their will, the way Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson might. With the Bo and Luke we get, it's tough to tell whether Scott and Knoxville are in on the joke or the brunt of it.

The worst news is that "The Dukes of Hazzard" arrives thoroughly upstaged by Simpson's cheeky music video for the film. (Given the brevity of her Daisy Dukes, you can take "cheeky" however you like.) The song is a customized version of "These Boots Are Made for Walking," and the video farcically suggests, in three-and-a-half minutes, the exuberant musical hoedown the whole thing should have been, right down to Simpson giving the General Lee a sponge bath in a bikini. The movie itself is 100 minutes of anticlimax.

Whenever Bo Duke (Seann William Scott) and Luke Duke (Johnny Knoxville), the rowdy, horny, and profoundly literal-minded good-ol'-boy cousins of The Dukes of Hazzard, get into a car chase, which happens to them about as often as most people pull up to a stoplight, you can be relatively certain of one thing: the General Lee, their orange hot rod with the Confederate flag painted on top, will careen down the road or (more likely) through the woods with such loosey-goosey, no-holds-barred abandon that it zooms ahead at a razory diagonal angle, perpetually in mid-swerve. The movie, likewise, guns forward at a sustained zigzag. It's trash, all right, but perfectly skewed trash — a comedy that knows just how smart to be about just how dumb it is.

Bo and Luke, who sell jars of moonshine manufactured by their grizzled Uncle Jesse (Willie Nelson), want nothing more out of life than to fight, party, race cars, and chase curvalicious Dixie chicks. The two are loopy cornpone hedonists devoted to the American dream: the pursuit of happiness, white-trash yokel style. Somehow, though, the law has a way of always squashing their freedom, and fighting back is no simple trick. It takes lots of schemes and plans; it takes entire convoluted episodes.

When Luke, with his scuzzy scowl, and Bo, with his maniacal infantile gleam, attempt to break into the safe of Boss Hogg (Burt Reynolds, a-twinkle with sin), the corrupt commissioner who is plotting to strip-mine Hazzard County, it's a job as tricky as splitting the atom, albeit with somewhat more primitive means. The safe gets dragged by tow truck through the office window, then down the road, where it smashes a bunch of mailboxes, then down the road farther, with Luke pulled along on top of it. A few strategically placed explosives, along with a flaming arrow, finally do the trick, but what gives the sequence its nuthouse kick is that it's staged with utter demented conviction, as the epitome of common sense. In Hazzard County, this is how you bust open a safe, dammit. By any idiotic means necessary.

When it premiered in 1979, The Dukes of Hazzard looked like the final chapter in the schlockification of TV. It drew on the corporate jiggle of Charlie's Angels, the how-low-can-you-go cheesiness of Fantasy Island, but what gave Dukes its unique doltish appeal was the innocuous ease with which it co-opted the dregs of '70s outlaw culture. Bo and Luke may have been Ken dolls in Stetsons, but the series, which drew on the New South kitsch of CB radios, Smokey and the Bandit, and the lame-duck aimlessness of the late Jimmy Carter era, had the brain-dead temerity to insist that these plastic hicks were true-blue ''rebels.'' On TV, at least, this is what bad-boy insouciance had come to: beefcake ciphers with paste-on accents sticking it to the man between station breaks.

As a movie, The Dukes of Hazzard is more fun than it has any right to be, perhaps because it's not a cynical hipster campfest. Unlike, say, the strenuously tongue-in-cheek buddy movie that was fashioned out of Starsky & Hutch, it doesn't condescend to the original show. It hardly needs to: The condescension is built into the material, and so the director, Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers), out-hips the hipsters by playing it straight, italicizing the dopiness ever so slightly, letting the throwaway chicanery of The Dukes of Hazzard wink at itself. He makes the chintzy pleasures of one-dimensional storytelling seem like hog-wild innocence rather than an insult.

Then, too, Chandrasekhar kicks up the series' sexy energy. The car chases are blissful celebrations of movement and flight, cued to the burnt-rubber scorch of '70s Southern-rock chestnuts like the Allman Brothers Band's ''One Way Out'' and Molly Hatchet's ''Flirtin' With Disaster,'' and Scott and Knoxville are a rudely charming pair of low-down freewheelers. When they sneak into a lab at a university in Atlanta, pretending to be Japanese science geeks, the film cuddles up to racism without quite crossing over into it. Bo and Luke are such ingenuous nitwit tricksters that they turn xenophobia into a half-cocked state of grace.

And then, of course, there's Daisy Duke, their perversely wholesome sex-bomb cousin, who uses her willowy assets to ease them out of tight spots. On the show, Catherine Bach got famous for mainstreaming a disco fashion trend, but apart from those butt-cleaving cutoffs, she was a flavorless wedge of cheesecake. Jessica Simpson, with skin as tawny as melted caramel and a smile of joy to rival Julia Roberts', turns Daisy into a vibrantly luscious comic tease. She's Little Annie Fanny as the world's most self-mocking Hooters waitress, and it will be no surprise if Simpson's star keeps rising long after she has hung up her short shorts.