Alicia Silverstone, Benicio Del Toro, Christopher Walken
There's one great gag in Excess Baggage, a muddleheaded black comedy in which Silverstone plays a dippy rich girl who fakes her own kidnapping to get her mondo businessman father's attention ("All I ever wanted was a father who would love me," she explains). The gag? When her cold fish of a father forks over the $1 million ransom she has requested ("It was never about the money," she tells us), the money blows away after the suitcase containing the bills is opened out of doors and a police helicopter flying too close kicks up the wind.
That gag comes early in the movie, and then it's a long, hard sit as Silverstone and Del Toro—the good-guy car thief who accidentally steals the BMW in whose trunk she has hidden herself—joust with each other while on the run from her father, the cops, Del Toro's fellow thieves and Walken, whose hair here is dyed a shade of red one sees only on women in Paris. The whiskey-voiced Del Toro (The Usual Suspects and The Funeral), who always looks as if he has just been roused from an afternoon nap, continues to impress with his flaky way of sneaking up on a line. Silverstone, so winning as the ultimate teenager in Clueless, seems clueless here as to how to play her character other than to pout. Baggage is never as annoying as you fear it might get, but neither is it very good. (PG-13)
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