Listen, I've had just about enough of your comedy, clown.

Quick Change

(1990)

(SPOILERS) Bill Murray’s heist comedy was a resounding flop on release, one I nevertheless caught in the cinema nearly a year later when it finally limped across to the UK. Why it sank when the subsequent year’s (or the same year’s, if you lived in Britain) What About Bob? swam is unclear, since it came at a time when Murray’s star was commercially at a peak. Warner Bros gets much of the blame for failing on the promotion front but, revisiting the picture, it’s evident Quick Change is a case of a strong script in search of a strong director, and neither of its shots-callers are that.

Murray co-directed with Howard Franklin (who also penned the screenplay, from Jay Cronley’s novel), after Jonathan Demme couldn’t squeeze it into his schedule. Which is a great shame, as the energy Demme had brought to his recent pictures Something Wild and Married to the Mob (like Quick Change, a movie featuring a circus performer with a gun; “Some clown tried to kill me”, relays mob boss Dean Stockwell after Chris Isaak fails to rub him out) is exactly what Quick Change lacks; in this case, it’s the difference between a decent movie and a classic. It would, however, make a good triple bill of movies involving a night askew with After Hours and Into the Night, both exuding an exultant sense of strangeness Quick Change only grasps fitfully; Scorsese’s film is one of his best and most underrated, a perfect black comedy from a director who rarely strays into that genre, while John Landis nails his lead character’s insomniac excursion into the twilight zone with aplomb.

Quick Change, though, is often so ridiculously static in composition and staging, you become aware of just how fully the performers are carrying it, and you credit their work all the more as a result (so too, Randy Edleman’s score is effective when used, but features too infrequently). Apparently Ron Howard turned the movie down and, while I’m not a fan of his work, he’d probably have ensured the finished film had a better sense of flow. This is a picture with natural drive and desperation in its DNA, and it would have taken very little to wind that up to the maximum. Murray’s Grimm stages an audacious bank robbery dressed as a clown, escapes ingeniously with his two accomplices, Phyllis (Geena Davis) and Loomis (Randy Quaid), only to find his attempts to reach New York’s JFK Airport continually thwarted by the town he’s desperate to leave, with Jason Robard’s dogged Chief Rotzinger bearing down on him.

It’s ideal material to hang lunatic and unlikely interludes on, and imbue its characters with ever-increasing frustration at events’ determined resistance to go according to plan. In this, Murray’s deadpan charisma is perfectly posited, be it his vague attempts to suggest he’s a psycho (“I shot the lights. They were looking at me” he explains of the cameras in the bank, while pretending to be a Nam veteran), responding to Robards (a succession of clown one-liners all land), asking directions from some road workers (“Thank you guys. You could’ve given us help, but you’ve given us so much more”) or opining on the difficulties in getting through airport check-in (“Those damn terrorists have made it tough on us bank robbers”). This is Murray’s delivery at its finest, responding to each new incident with the same rumpled unruffledness.

He’s ably supported by Davis and Quaid. The latter wheels out his idiot best buddy for what was probably the umpteenth time, responsible for honking a horn and setting Rotzinger on their trail (“Sometimes their noses are horns” offers one of Rotzinger’s subordinates by way of explanation for how the sound might have emanated from within the bank). At one point, able to take no more of Tony Shaloub’s uncomprehending Arabic cabbie (“What, have you got shit in your ears?” Quaid exclaims unhingedly) he memorably leaps out of a moving vehicle, running straight into a billboard. Davis has easy chemistry with Murray, even if her role isn’t the most pro-active, and she’s encumbered with a second-rate subplot concerning whether or not to tell Grimm about her pregnancy. She’s at least rewarded with one of the best lines, though (“No, no if that was our plane it would be crashing”).

But it’s the incidental encounters that really sell this, from a surreal bicycle joust with mops as lances (“It’s bad luck just seeing a thing like that” gasps Quaid), to Shaloub’s incomprehensible antics, proving to be a thorn in their side long after they have exited his cab, to their encounter with the mafia (“This ain’t my dick in your back” exclaims Stanley Tucci’s gun wielding gangster; “That’s a relief” responds Murray) to their bus ride from hell, courtesy of Philip Bosco’s anal driver demanding exact change, unable to give an exact estimate of the walk between the bus stop and airport before offering a precise “21 minutes”. The bus sequence is particularly sublime, with Grimm desperately waiting in a very slow queue in a shop nearby for his exact change, responding to the local odours (“What’s that smell?” asks Phyllis; “Used wine” replies Grimm) and faced with a man with a guitar strapped to his back who repeatedly fails to make adjustments for the size of the door.

At the airport, Woody Allen regular Ira Wheeler offers priceless horror at whatever Murray and Quaid are up to behind a men’s room cubicle door (it’s an old set up, but it’s all in the delivery) and Kurtwood Smith cameos with a veneer of unrepentant obnoxiousness as the mafia guy in charge. Howard reportedly didn’t take the movie because there was no one to root for, missing that you always root for Bill Murray. Added to which, Phyllis’ pregnancy lends the picture an excuse for this trio not to face the long arm of the law, after which it is emphasised that Smith’s guy is a real villain who makes more in a day than Grimm could make off with in a week; I’m not sure the picture really needs to foist a moral hierarchy on us, but that’s in the nature of Hollywood studio think. If the criminals are going to get away with it, they have to be thoroughly decent criminals really.

Quick Change was previously adapted five years earlier, with the unlikely combination of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Kim Cattrall (set in Montreal), and I’d be surprised if it isn’t adapted again at some point. There’s little fault in the script or performers, but a director able to embrace its frenetic splendour could have engineered an unalloyed classic.

I think I’m Pablo Picasso!

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) (SPOILERS) I get the impression that, whatever it is stalwart Venom fans want from a Venom movie, this iteration isn’t it. The highlight here for me is absolutely the wacky, love-hate, buddy-movie antics of Tom Hardy and his symbiote alter. That was the best part of the original, before it locked into plot “progression” and teetered towards a climax where one CGI monster with gnarly teeth had at another CGI monster with gnarly teeth. And so it is for Venom: Let There Be Carnage . But cutting quicker to the chase.

I don’t think Wimpys still exist.

Last Night in Soho (2021) (SPOILERS) Last Night in Soho is a cautionary lesson in one’s reach extending one’s grasp. It isn’t that Edgar Wright shouldn’t attempt to stretch himself, it’s simply that he needs the self-awareness to realise which moves are going to throw his back out and leave him in a floundering and enfeebled heap on the studio floor. Wright’s an uber-geek, one with a very specific comfort zone, and there’s no shame in that. He evidently was shamed, though, hence this response to criticisms of a lack of maturity and – obviously – lack of versatility with female characters. Last Night in Soho goes broke for woke, and in so doing exposes his new clothes in the least flattering light. Because Edgar is in no way woke, his attempts to prove his progressive mettle lead to a lurid, muddled mess, one that will satisfy no one. Well, perhaps his most ardent fans, but no one else.

It looks like a digital walkout.

Free Guy (2021) (SPOILERS) Ostensibly a twenty-first century refresh of The Truman Show , in which an oblivious innocent realises his life is a lie, and that he is simply a puppet engineered for the entertainment of his creators/controllers/the masses, Free Guy lends itself to similar readings regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of our reality, of who sets the paradigm and how conscious we are of its limitations. But there’s an additional layer in there too, a more insidious one than using a Hollywood movie to “tell us how it really is”.

Give poor, starving Gurgi munchings and crunchings.

The Black Cauldron (1985) (SPOILERS) Dark Disney? I guess… Kind of . I don’t think I ever got round to seeing this previously. The Fox and the Hound , sure. Basil the Great Mouse Detective , most certainly. Even Oliver and Company , so I wasn’t that selective. But I must have missed The Black Cauldron , the one that nearly broke Disney, for the same reason everyone else did. But what reason was that? Perhaps nothing leaping out about it, when the same summer kids could see The Goonies , or Back to the Future , or Pee Wee’s Big Adventure . It seemed like a soup of other, better-executed ideas and past Disney movies, stirred up in a cauldron and slopped out into an environment where audiences now wanted something a touch more sophisticated.

The voice from the outer world who will lead them to paradise.

Dune (2021) (SPOILERS) For someone who has increasingly dug himself a science-fiction groove, Denis Villeneuve isn’t terribly imaginative. Dune looks perfect, in the manner of the cool, clinical, calculating and above all glacial rendering of concept design and novel cover art in the most doggedly literal fashion. And that’s the problem. David Lynch’s edition may have had its problems, but it was inimitably the product of a mind brimming with sensibility. Villeneuve’s version announces itself as so determinedly faithful to Frank Herbert, it needs two movies to tell one book, and yet all it really has to show for itself are gargantuan vistas.

Monster nom nom?

The Suicide Squad (2021) (SPOILERS) This is what you get from James Gunn when he hasn’t been fed through the Disney rainbow filter. Pure, unadulterated charmlessness, as if he’s been raiding his deleted Twitter account for inspiration. The Suicide Squad has none of the “heart” of Guardians of Galaxy , barely a trace of structure, and revels in the kind of gross out previously found in Slither ; granted an R rating, Gunn revels in this freedom with juvenile glee, but such carte blanche only occasionally pays off, and more commonly leads to a kind of playground repetition. He gets to taunt everyone, and then kill them. Critics applauded; general audiences resisted. They were right to.

It becomes easier each time… until it kills you.

The X-Files 4.9: Terma Oh dear. After an engaging opener, the second part of this story drops through the floor, and even the usually spirited Rob Bowman can’t save the lethargic mess Carter and Spotnitz make of some actually pretty promising plot threads.

Oh hello, loves, what year is it?

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) (SPOILERS) Simu Lui must surely be the least charismatic lead in a major motion picture since… er, Taylor Lautner? He isn’t aggressively bad, like Lautner was/is, but he’s so blank, so nondescript, he makes Marvel’s super-spiffy new superhero Shang-Chi a superplank by osmosis. Just looking at him makes me sleepy, so it’s lucky Akwafina is wired enough for the both of them. At least, until she gets saddled with standard sidekick support heroics and any discernible personality promptly dissolves. And so, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings continues Kevin Feige’s bold journey into wokesense, seemingly at the expense of any interest in dramatically engaging the viewer.

Three. Two. One. Lift with your neck.

Red Notice (2021) (SPOILERS) Red Notice rather epitomises Netflix output. Not the 95% that is dismissible, subgrade filler no one is watching but is nevertheless churned out as original “content”. No, this would be the other, more select tier constituting Hollywood names and non-negligible budgets. Most such fare still fails to justify its existence in any way, shape or form, singularly lacking discernible quality control or “studio” oversight. Albeit, one might make similar accusations of a selection of legit actual studio product too, but it’s the sheer consistency of unleavened movies that sets Netflix apart. So it is with Red Notice . Largely lambasted by the critics, in much the manner of, say 6 Underground or Army of the Dead , it is in fact, and just like those, no more and no less than okay.

He's not a nightstalker, and it'll take a lot more than bench presses to defeat him.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) (SPOILERS) The most successful entry in the franchise, if you don’t count Freddy vs. Jason . And the point at which Freddy went full-on vaudeville, transformed into adored ringmaster rather than feared boogeyman. Not that he was ever very terrifying in the first place (the common misapprehension is that later instalments spoiled the character, but frankly, allowing Robert Englund to milk the laughs in bad-taste fashion is the saving grace of otherwise forgettably formulaic sequel construction). A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master boasts the most inventive, proficient effects work yet, but it’s also by far the least daring in terms of plotting, scraping together a means for Freddy to persist in his nocturnal pestilence while offering nothing in the way of the unexpected, be it characterisations or story points.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog