By Richard Winters
My Rating: 0 out of 10
4-Word Review: Don’t get her drunk!
Walter (Bruce Willis) needs a date as he’s having dinner with a very important client that he has to impress in order to get a business deal to go through. Walter’s brother Ted (Phil Hartman) sets him up with his wife’s cousin Nadia (Kim Basinger). She’s a very beautiful lady who’s just getting over a bad break-up with her possessive boyfriend David (John Larroquette). There’s only one hitch: Walter must make sure that she doesn’t drink any alcohol because if she does she’ll go ‘wild’. Walter though dismisses the warning and offers her a glass of champagne, which soon leads to a night of massive calamity.
Blake Edwards directed a lot of duds in the 80’s and I thought That’s Life and Skin Deep were two of his worst, but this one clearly beats those by a mile. It has shades of After Hours and had this thing kept the story revolving over the happenings of one night it might’ve worked a bit better, but the second-half goes way off-kilter, which really kills the whole thing and turns it into a complete catastrophe. Screenwriter Dale Launer shouldn’t be blamed either as while his name is still on the credits the script was rewritten so may times that it shared nothing with his originally concept and he ultimately disowned it.
The problem starts right away with the whole alcohol thing as Basinger acts overly drunk after having only a few sips. Her transformation into this crazy lady is more creepy than funny like she has a split personality, or some sort of mental condition. Most guys would be running from her almost immediately and never look back and how someone could ‘fall-in-love’ with her after such obnoxious and erratic behavior defies explanation. If there was ever a bad date night this would be one. The fact that she puts up $10,000 for his bail the next day shouldn’t make-up for it like it does here and where exactly is this lady getting her hands on such quick cash anyways since she can’t afford a place of her own and must reside with others?
Willis is great when he’s the one making wise-cracks like he did in the classic TV-show ‘Moonlighting’, but playing the straight-man who simply responds to all the nuttiness happening around him doesn’t work at all. Having Basinger sober up and then Willis be the one to act zany at a later party they go doesn’t make any sense and seems more like it’s some ‘crazy personality virus’ going around or a possession of some kind that like with the cold or flu can easily transfer from one person to another.
Larroquette as the psycho boyfriend pops-in way too conveniently and becomes a bit hard to imagine how he’s able to constantly track the two down no matter where the go and the fact that his car crashes into the three different storefronts, but the front end of the vehicle remains completely intact, defies logic. His character gets neutered by adding in his parents (William Daniels, Alice Hirson) during the second act whose presence doesn’t really help propel the plot along, but instead seems to take the story in an entirely different direction. Having Larroquette defend Willis in court even though he had a lot to do with why he was in trouble and whose name was mostly likely on the police report and then to have the judge turn-out to be his own father is so outlandish that it’s beyond stupid.
This movie also has somewhat of a personal connection as I was living in L.A. in June of 1986 when it was being filmed and stood around with other pedestrians for a day to watch one of the outdoor scenes that was being shot in a nearby neighborhood. The scene that I saw being filmed comes around the 1-hour mark and entails Willis throwing a beer bottle at the rear window of Hartman’s car and smashing it. The scene took several hours to film as Edwards, who sat under the shade of an umbrella while the cast and crew and had to stand under the hot sun, seemed to be dissatisfied with every take and kept making the actors do the same bit over and over that I found it to be really boring and didn’t think there could be anything duller until of course I finally watched the finished movie, which I found to be even worse.
My Rating: 0 out of 10
Released: March 24, 1987
Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Director: Blake Edwards
Studio: Tri Star Pictures
Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 