Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Randy Quaid, Jason Robards
Mixing pratfall slapstick and soft-boiled egghead wit, this engaging comedy is the best thing to hit the New York Anti-Chamber of Commerce since The Out-of-Towners.
Its premise is that Murray, a frustrated city official, takes hostages and robs a bank so he can afford to flee New York City's crowds, rudeness, crime, noise, dirt and general lack of the qualities associated with civilized societies. Murray, and his co-director, Howard Franklin, who wrote the screenplay, make it funny even without harpooning such fish-in-a-Big-Apple-barrel as George Steinbrenner, Donald Trump or Al Sharpton. (The comedy is, if anything, too nice.)
The opening is inspired, with Murray doing the robbery in clown costume. When a disillusioned bank guard, Bob Elliott (of Bob and Ray), asks, "What kind of a clown are you?" Murray shrugs, "I guess I'm just the kind who's crying on the inside."
Elliott is a marvel of attitude (gruff and self-serving) and timing (impeccable). When Murray tells the hostages he'll be releasing one of them soon, the aging Elliott jumps up to call out, "Oldest first!"
The movie loses some snap after the first 20 minutes, but it is full of small roles played perfectly, from Tony Shalhoub as a cabbie who speaks no English (or any identifiable language) to Philip Bosco as a bus driver whom Murray, during a halting getaway, calls "the evil twin of Ralph Kramden."
It would spoil some fun to describe how Davis and Quaid fit into the plot. In any case, Davis is getting funnier all the time. Quaid's contortable face and jumble of a body make him a natural film comic. And, noble actor that he is, Robards plays straight man as the police commissioner who turns Murray's case into a crusade.
As for Murray, he still has the disarming look of a pup who tilts his head lovably before nipping your finger. And few actors can turn a line around as well as he can; here he is well into a romantic reminiscence when he says, "And then you gave me that look that says, 'I blame you for everything.' "
He and Franklin, adapting a novel by Jay Cronley, underplay such sight gags as cops dusting the clown's balloons for fingerprints; they never confuse mere tastelessness with wit. It's uncomfortably similar to Cadillac Man, but Quick Change sustains its momentum up to the last, neatly turned kicker of a line. Liza and Frank never spread the news about New York so enjoyably. (R)
Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze
First: This isn't another movie about friendly spirits hanging out. It takes the ghost business with boneheaded seriousness.
For example, once New York City investment type Swayze is killed in a mugging and realizes he's dead to the world (though visible to the audience), he starts researching ghost behavior. He wants to help Moore, his girlfriend, catch his killer. So he finds a veteran ghost, Vincent Schiavelli, who can physically influence the living.
Swayze goes into training, and Schiavelli tells him, "You've gotta take all your emotion—all your anger, love, hate—push it way down into the pit of your stomach and let it explode." In its intensity and mumbo jumbo, the scene resembles Yoda guru-ing Luke—you expect Schiavelli to tell Swayze, "Let the ectoplasm be with you."
Then there are the fundamentalist Christian overtones. When a villain dies, he is dragged off screaming—dragged down, into the floor—by animated black shapes who look like refugees from Fantasia. When a nice guy buys it, he is led in his ascent by a squadron of luminous Ping-Pong balls, who are clearly leading him to Heaven—or maybe even the place where Kevin Costner drafted his players in Field of Dreams.
Meanwhile, back on the earthly plane, Moore is setting an all-time record for most scenes of tears welling up in eyes as she mourns Swayze. Then she meets Whoopi Goldberg, a medium who really has the ability to talk to the beyond. The film's highlight comes when Swayze's spirit leaves his visible self to enter Goldberg's body so he/she can touch Moore. For a moment it looks as if we're about to see an interracial, lesbian, proxy sex scene.
But nooooooo. We have to deal with the real villain, whose identity is intended to be a mystery for a while, though it's obvious.
A subdued Goldberg has a good moment or two, and Tony Goldwyn (grandson of mogul Sam) is effective as Swayze's best friend. But this film is dopily written by Bruce Joel Rubin. ("You lying snake!" is one of his big lines for Swayze.) The zero-perspective direction is by Jerry Zucker, who has been involved with on-purpose-funny movies—such as Airplane!—but none that more richly deserves guffaws than this one.
If making bad movies qualifies as a deadly sin, Rubin and Zucker had better start pushing all their emotion into the pit of their stomachs right now so they have a fighting chance when those little devils in the black outfits come after them. (PG-13)
Griff Rhys Jones, Mel Smith
Very broad, very British and very amusing, this comedy mystery is essentially a Hitchcock send-up that could have been called Dial S for Slapstick.
Jones and Smith (a British comedy team) play a nagged-to-distraction college professor and an ambitious but slow-witted police detective, who thinks the prof (Jones) has murdered his wife.
Be advised at the outset that the intellectual level of the proceedings is not lofty: One man complains, "That's what I get for marrying a dyke," and then someone asks if he is calling his wife a lesbian. "Certainly not," the man replies huffily. "She has all the phone numbers. She can call one herself."
Then there's the scene where Smith, following a potential lead, goes into an adult bookstore. After gaping at the array of "marital aids," he does a take and asks the proprietor, "Do people buy tartan dildos?" "That," says the indignant shop owner, "is my thermos."
Jones affects a haughty disdain that would do John Cleese proud, even as he conducts his technical-college class for apprentice sausage makers, a course that, he notes, "covers politics, literature, CPR and how to open a bank account." Smith is a classic music-hall humbler, a comic talent who is worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with Oliver Hardy and Peter Sellers.
Alison (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) Steadman is fun as Jones's wife, who is addicted to a variety of fleeting obsessions, from trampolining, scuba diving and tennis to T'ai Chi and health foods. When Jones complains to her, she scoffs, "I'm sure you're irritable because your colon is clenched."
Steadman's disappearance in the midst of a series of stranglings—the disappearance is a mystery to the audience as well as to Smith—gets intertwined with a missing inflatable plastic sex doll. While a long sequence in which Jones gets physically attached to the doll is the film's silliest (also most tiresome) segment, nothing else is what you would call sobersided either.
Taken from Tom Sharpe's novel Wilt and directed by Michael (TV's Summer of My German Soldier) Tuchner with a no-pratfalls-barred attitude, this is an accomplished small comedy—in tone and aspiration something like the recent American film I Love You to Death.
It is just the kind of thing for someone who might find it funny to hear an exasperated police inspector say, "I'll have my evidence if I have to search every sausage in the south of England!" (Not rated)
>ROTTEN YEGGS: FAMILY BUSINESS It couldn't have been easy to start off with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick and end up with such a silly, dreary movie, but director Sidney Lumet manages. The three stars play a grandfather-father-son team of crooks in a plot that seems to suggest burglary is basically a lark (if not very entertaining to watch) and certainly a more admirable way of life than boring old legitimate work. What next, Sid? A little light comedy about a group of international terrorist cousins? (RCA/Columbia)
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
