Awful. One of 2003's worst films.

D+

I thought I was alone here with this one...


Terrible. Painfully unfunny... and just a waste of the good talent involved. D

C


Actually I did laugh a couple of times, but certainly not enough to qualify this is a solid comedy. Definitely a big waste of talent here.

When it started I thought it was going to be crap but after a few minutes of Michael Douglas and then the brilliance of Albert Brooks, I knew it was a winner. It's seriously crazy but it's so fast-paced and fun that it kind of works. It's like an 80s spy comedy starring Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy, but not as clever and more absurdly entertaining.

Samaha produced some fine movies back in the early 2000s. It's a shame he got caught defrauding their financiers. And that poster definitely gives off the wrong impression. It should've added a spy element to it. Instead it just looks like another family-rom-com.

The opening is odd. The first shot is a lake with the location text "Nova Scotia", then after just a few short seconds it cuts to another location in Russia or somewhere. Like, nothing even happened in Nova Scotia. Why show it? It feels like something was either cut or it's just a very big editing cock-up. Even when it goes to Russia, it doesn't feel competently pieced together ... until we see Michael Douglas, then it seems to calm down. Honestly, in those first few minutes I thought I was watching an Asylum version of The In-Laws. The title comes up right at the beginning with no pre-title sequence or anything. It feels very cheap. Once it gets going it's fine, though. And McCartney's "Live and Let Die" is a good way to make up for it.

Oh, also just remembered the Vietnamese restaurant scene. I particularly enjoyed that and the lead up to it when Douglas meets Brooks for the first time. It's a little bit of a shame that dynamic (Brooks not knowing what Douglas is) doesn't carry on for the rest of the film.