Anyone who spends a few minutes in his company will find it easy to see why Australia has taken the eponymous hero of Kenny to its fleshy bosom. The assistant manager of a Melbourne company that supplies and services portable toilets, Kenny is sweet, decent and blessed with the gift of gab. Whether explaining to a client how the “piss-and-shit ratio” for a festival crowd will be affected by the presence of curries on the menu, noting how dogs seem as embarrassed as humans are when doing their business (“and they’ll eat it!”) or confronting a smell “that’ll outlast religion,” Kenny is never at a loss for words.

But what makes this beefy bloke in overalls more than another oddball mockumentary protagonist is that his creators — Shane and Clayton Jacobson, who co-wrote the Aussie hit, with Shane in the lead and Clayton behind the camera — treat him without a speck of condescension. As a result, the film’s supply of warmth and charm is as bountiful as its jokes about breakfast loaves. So it’s too bad that the movie around Kenny — charting his troubles with co-workers, his hostile ex-wife and shy son, and his disapproving father — is rarely as compelling as he is. Though trimmed down from the version that played at OzFlix last year, Kenny is still overextended, the Jacobsons being too besotted with their own creation to rein him in as much as they need to.

Then again, few recent movie characters are so fully realized or so eminently likeable, which is why it’s such an affront to see Kenny mistreated by those who look down on the man just because he takes care of their shit. “I don’t know whether they think I eat it or whether they think I scrub it on myself,” says Kenny. “I plumb it!” 

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