By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Bank robber becomes hostage.
Daniel Lucas (Nick Nolte) gets released from jail after serving 4 years for armed bank robbery. After getting out he goes to a nearby bank to cash his prison check and inexplicably gets caught up in another robbery when Ned (Martin Short) tries robbing the bank that Daniel is in, in order to pay for a special school to take his daughter Meg (Sarah Rowland Doroff) to since she refuses to talk. When the police surround the building Ned decides to take Daniel hostage in order to escape. Inspector Dugan (James Earl Jones), who was the one who had arrested Daniel for his earlier crimes, is convinced that Daniel has orchestrated this one too and tries chasing him down, so that he can arrest him again.
Hard to believe that such a successful screenwriter like Francis Veber could write such a dud like this, but after the first 10-minutes this thing falls precariously flat. In fact the opening robbery is the only thing in it that is funny and had it stayed on that level, with Daniel and Ned trying to avoid the relentless pursuit of Dugan while Daniel tries to clear his innocence, this might’ve worked, but too much other stuff gets thrown in that dilutes the main concept until it’s not fun anymore.
The introduction of the kid backfires. She is certainly adorable especially the way she goes running and does help lend sympathy to Ned and his motivations, but the cute factor gets laid on a bit too thick and eventually becomes forced. While I may not have a PHD in psychology the concept that this girl at the young age of 5 would just decide to not talk didn’t seem realistic. You can say it was caused by the death of her mother 2 years earlier, but other kids deal with their parent’s death and that doesn’t stop them from speaking. Kids have notoriously short attention spans, so to have her keep up this non-talking for literally years and have it not deeply rooted in some neurological issue was just too much of a stretch. No explanation either for why Nolte’s presence would suddenly get her to start talking again and then when she finally does start to speak, she begins to babble incessantly, which gets to be a problem the other way.
The police are too inept here. There are plenty of other films featuring bumbling cops and some of them can be funny, but here it doesn’t get played for laughs and instead just used as a way to get the characters out of a dilemma. Once an APB gets put out of the robbery and the men’s identity it becomes hard to believe that Ned would still be able to walk the streets in full view of the cops, which he inadvertently bumps into while walking on the sidewalk and even interact with, and not immediately be recognized. The car chases are dumb too. One has them two driving off the road and into a ditch while the police cars speed by, but it wouldn’t be long for the police to realize they’ve gone too far after not spotting them and turn around especially when Ned’s car explodes from the grenade that was left inside, which should’ve immediately signaled their whereabouts to the police. Later, during another chase, Ned is able to easily fool the police by turning under a bridge and parking his car behind another one while the cops go speeding by, but if it’s this easy to consistently dupe the police you wonder how they’re ever able to catch anyone.
Nolte’s okay in his gruff kind of way, but Short is too high strung making his character more tense and anxious than funny. Kenneth McMillan, an excellent character actor whose last film this was, gets stuck with a dumb role involving a veterinarian who apparently is so senile he thinks Nolte is a dog, but to ‘see’ a grown, big guy like Nick as a canine means he’s got far more problems with his mind than just dementia and thus his moments come off as protracted and desperate for laughs that never come.
Spoiler Alert!
The jump-the-shark moment comes at the end when Short finds himself taken hostage by yet another bank robber. While I love irony this concept gives it a bad name and like with everything else in the movie seems thrown in as a way to allow the characters to have a quick convenient way out of their predicament with no concern whether it makes sense or beats astronomical odds. The small sporadic chuckles that you may have does not make up for seating through the rest of it.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: January 27, 1989
Runtime: 1 Hour 36 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Director: Francis Veber
Studio: Touchstone Pictures
Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 