“The Jesse Ventura Story”

Sunday at 9 on WNBC/Ch.4

One Star Rating

IF you still don’t think Jesse “The Body-Turned-Brain” Ventura is the greatest thing since sliced bread, let him get in your face for two hours Sunday and ram his mea-ness down your throat.

“The Jesse Ventura Story” isn’t nearly as subtle as its hulking anti-hero.

The producers seem to have spent too much time watching HBO’s razzle-dazzle Don King bio-pic. They have applied the device of having Jesse (Nils Allen Stewart, who looks like a beefy Tommy Lee Jones but can’t cut the acting mustard) intrude whenever possible to point out the obvious or the unnecessary.

The narrator Jesse won’t breath a word about how Ventura, as he recently confessed, wears no underwear, but he will explain an embolism when the pro wrestler Jesse is taken out of the ring by cumulative injuries suffered in the line of duty that he says up front is fake.

We hear enough all-American platitudes to take Ventura from the Minnesota governor’s mansion, which he moved into in January, to the White House.

He leaves Minnesota and his storybook blue-collar family a little guy bent on being the toughest of the few good men the Marines are always looking for.

“SEAL training is a six-month kick in the coconuts,” Jesse the narrator says, “but let me tell you, they’re coconuts worth having.”

After coaching his wife through childbirth (“Pain is good. Extreme pain is extremely good”) and turns as wrestling commentator, stand-in and actor, he gets into politics to clean up whatever is giving rashes to the ducks he likes to shoot.

He gets elected mayor of Brooklyn Park, which earns him an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. Bryant Gumbel should sue for defamation of character and physique.

While wrasslers such as Goldberg, Raven and Chris Kanyon appear as themselves, a wimpy, doughy stand-in sits in as Gumbel.

On the other hand, maybe the real Gumbel can laugh at “Jesse,” which would indeed be funny if it didn’t take itself so seriously.