Rating: 

The Info

Directed by: Sam Weisman
Written by: Marc Lawrence (based on Neil Simon's 1970 screenplay)
Starring: Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, John Cleese, Mark McKinney
Produced by: Robert W. Cort, Robert Evans, David Madden, Teri Schwartz

The Nutshell

A long-married couple have many adventures in New York over a weekend.

The Review

    Let's say you are writing the screenplay for a mainstream comedy. Your main character has had nothing to eat all day and finds some change. He goes to a vending machine and hits the button for a candy bar. What funny thing happens now? Was "The candy bar gets stuck, causing the character to go into fits of rage, banging his fists on the vending machine" the first thing that came to mind? Probably, and this is the problem with the remake of Neil Simon's The Out-of-Towners; the humour is predictable and unfunny.

    The best comedies of 1999 have all been edgy, dark films that broke new comedic ground. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut shocked audiences world-wide with its swearing schoolchildren and Saddam Hussein/Satan gay love sub-plot. Election and Drop Dead Gorgeous both took on aspects of American life with glee; one American ambition, the other small-town life. So it is sad but inevitable that a comedian like Steve Martin, who has a specific, old-fashioned brand of wit, will get stuck in stinkers like this remake. Martin does still appear in the occasional great film (see this year's Bowfinger), but most of his filmwork in the nineties has been forgettable.

    Martin and Goldie Hawn are married couple Henry & Nancy Clark, who after seeing their son off to Europe, find themselves alone for the first time in years. A trip to New York where Henry has a job interview lined up winds up being chaotic as the couple get into all kinds of trouble. They get mugged, they get lost, they get caught doing naughty things in Central Park. Their characters are the same ones that the two actors are known for playing; Martin gets to say a lot of supposedly clever monologues where he rants and complains about things, while Goldie Hawn plays a whiny, neurotic well-off wife. John Cleese shows up as (surprise, surprise) a sarcastic British hotel employee, almost exactly mimicking his own character from short-lived TV show Fawlty Towers.

    Watching this film was hard work. The attempts at humour are so weak that we started a contest to see who could pre-empt the most punchlines. Re-making a comedy from 1970 is a fine idea, as long as the comedy is updated for the times. Clumsy characters falling and bumping into people simply does not make people laugh anymore. As Martin and Hawn jump from rented-car jokes to missed-train jokes and onwards, you find yourself thinking of those funny teenagers in American Pie, and the South Park kids. You think of anything to stop your mind from reeling at the absolute lack of laughs found in The-Out-of-Towners.

Copyright - Tim Chandler

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