Dir: Ivan Reitman
Star: Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Nastassja Kinski

“To whom it may concern. For years, I’ve thought about killing myself. It’s the only thing that has kept me going. But something always held me back.” Those are the first lines in the film we hear said by Dale Putley –  the character played by Robin Williams. Needless to say, given events since, watching the scene from a late-2014 perspective gives it an entirely different tone, derailing the comedic tone of the film in an extremely jarring fashion. It never recovers, though it’s hard to tell whether that’s a result of this unfortunate early faux-pas, or simply because it isn’t very good. Mind you, I speak as someone with a very low Robin Williams threshold: comedy, to me, requires more than gurning and funny accents.

This was, therefore, one of the films in the Kinskiography where I was not eagerly anticipating a revisit, especially as her role is ancillary: she kicks the plot off, then more or less vanishes for the next 80 minutes. She plays Collette Andrews, married for sixteen years and with a young son, Scott. When he runs away, and her husband won’t go after him, she reaches back into history, contacting her pre-nuptial boyfriend, Jack Lawrence (Crystal). Collette tells him about the situation – oh, and by the way, he’s Scott’s real father. When he defers, she goes to Dale – interrupting the suicide attempt when he, literally, has the gun in his mouth – and tells him the same thing. The two potential baby daddies meet up, and form an odd couple, Dale’s straight-laced lawyer contrasting with the emotional hippieness of Dale.

Scott is discovered trailing around the country with his girlfriend, following the band Sugar Ray – yeah, that doesn’t date this movie horribly at all… – but is also in trouble. He took $5,000 from a pair of drug-dealers (one of whom is played by Jared Harris of Mad Men), supposedly to make a buy, but then spent in on a diamond choker for his girlfriend. Who doesn’t like him very much. Pretty much a litany of bad decisions all round. Fortunately, these are not really bad drug-dealers, and can be disposed of, for plot purposes, with no more than a couple of head-butts from Jack. Meanwhile, his wife (Louis-Dreyus, in a performance nominated for a Golden Raspberry, and she does appear to be channeling the wooden spirit of Andie McDowell) is initially concerned by his apparent disappearance, but even more disturbed when she finds him hanging out in a hotel-room with a strange man and a teenage boy.

It isn’t a very successful comedy, with few if any likeable characters: Jack is perhaps the closest, but his flaws are numerous [though it helps that, every time he speak, I had an image in my head of Mike Wazowski]. Dale is insufferable and Scott is your typical whiny teenager who believes the entire world revolves round them: have the former chasing the latter, and I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quote about fox-hunting: “The unspeakable chasing the uneatable“.  Meanwhile, Colette’s husband does so little, he could have been erased entirely, since his sole purpose is to get rolled down a hill in a PortaPotty. It’s also based on a premise which is at best, manipulative, and at worst, downright cruel. Colette’s behavior is particularly indefensible: showing up out of the blue after 17 years to tell a former boyfriend he has a kid is questionable – and when, as here, you don’t even know if that’s actually the case, it becomes… Well, more than a bit cunty, frankly. The moral conclusions apparently reached by the film are a) all women are deceitful bitches, and b) it is perfectly fine to lie to somebody, if it makes them feel good, even if they know you’re lying. Yeah. About that…

I was a little surprised to find out, this was a remake of a French film, Les Compères [released in English-speaking countries, inexplicably, as ComDads]. It had Pierre Richard is Williams’ role, and Gérard Depardieu in Crystal’s, though the latter was an investigative journalist, rather than a lawyer. I haven’t seen it, so can’t saw whether or not it stands up any better. It would certainly be hard-pushed to be much worse, and the Internet concurs, with the IMDb scoring the original a full two points higher than the remake – and, for the latter, I think the score of 5.0 is being more than generous. This is somewhat of a surprise, as the writers here, Babaloo Mandez and Lowell Ganz, wrote for Crystal on other occasions, to much better effect, in particular scripting City Slickers. Director Reitman also has a solid track-record, most notably the two Ghostbusters films. You’d certainly expect better here.

The soundtrack includes a lot of songs which were probably top of the hit-parade at the time, but seem little more than tracks for a spinoff album, since they add little or nothing to the film’s atmosphere. I should also mention the particularly bizarre cameo by Mel Gibson as a body piercer that occurs at a rock concert near the end.  Seems he dropped by the set while filming Lethal Weapon 4 elsewhere on the Warner Bros. lot. Overall, this can only be recommended if you have a far higher appreciation for the work of Williams than I do. While I hate to speak ill of the dead, seeing him “ad-libbing” a stream of potential father figures in front of the mirror reminded me precisely of why I find him far more annoying than entertaining, especially in “zany hilarity” mode [I will say that some of his straight work is much better, e.g. Insomnia] As far as Kinski goes, I can only say, I hope the payment received was adequate.