Movie Review #62: The Wrong Guy (1997)

 

Well It's finally time. That's right. What am I talking about you may ask? Well back in the early 2010s I was a part of a forum called PlayTheNES, where we would talk about playing the NES.  You know the Nintendo Entertainment System. Well on one of the other forums where you could talk about other stuff I said I would review every Disney movie. Uh, I never ended up doing this. Ever. I didn't even watch a single film. Now It's time to hopefully rectify that. I plan to talk about all the animated movies, their live action movies, their made for tv movies, and the Disney Channel stuff. Yes this includes the direct to video sequels. If It has Disney somewhere on it and I can somehow find a copy I will discuss it on this blog. I will even throw in every movie made by Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures, two movie divisions owned by Disney. So expect a good time. Hopefully.

So I've mentioned Touchstone Pictures before in one review, well Hollywood Pictures was similar to that, except it seemed to have a lot more non-comedy movies. Sure they still put out comedies but they also did movies like The Sixth Sense, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Super Mario Bros: The Movie. That's right, Disney helped bring that fine piece of cinema into the world. I'm not joking about that being a fine piece of cinema either. I think that movie is a very fun time. Anyway I picked this movie for a few reasons. I enjoyed several of the actors within this movie, Dave Foley from Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio. Jennifer Tilly and Joe Flaherty. Three individuals that are pretty underrated and should have had bigger film careers. Dave Foley deserved a film career over Pauly Shore or Nick Swardson or Allen Covert. The shame is that I think this is the one film he was the star of and it's just not very good.

I'll give you a quick rundown of the plot. Dave plays Nelson a man who finds his boss dead (after saying he'd kill him) and gets all bloody and he honestly thinks the police think he killed his boss. Except the boss was killed by someone else and they even have video evidence on this. The guy was hired by the guy who got the job instead of Nelson. Nelson thinks he has to go on the run and the hitman thinks he is following him and you'd think wackiness would ensue but there's long stretches in this movie where they don't even try to make any jokes. Like it's really weird to see. There are also a few jokes that get stretched on way to long. It's like yes we get the joke can we get to the next scene? Another thing  that hurts this movie is that Joe Flaherty and Jennifer Tilly don't show up till halfway through the second act. 

However the biggest problem with this movie is that most of the actors are not comedic actors and ruin jokes by just not being good at this kind of comedy. There's a police officer duo that are wasting the FBIs money doing things not related to finding the killer but the guy just feels bored being in this movie. It's not very good. He's not the only one who's just not very good at comedy. There's a evil farmer who has it out for the Joe Flaherty banker (you know a flipparoo from the usual kinda plot) and well not only is that farmer guy not a good actor this entire subplot is just flushed down the shitter. We don't even know what happens and they do a sorta throwaway joke about it, just they didn't pull off that type of joke just annoyed me. I will be completely fair and say I still did laugh and chuckle at several moments in this movie. There's a fun scene with Kevin MacDonald (also from Kids in the Hall), it doesn't really save this movie. A lot of it is just Dave Foley and the killer going from random different scene to random different scene until Jennifer Tilly comes in and then they don't even finish her and her dad's subplot. 

FINAL VERDICT: I was disappointed in this motion picture. I was hoping for something better and more entertaining. I guess the really big Disney/Touchstone/Hollywood Pictures watchathon is off on a bad foot. Hopefully I'll find another better movie for the next one.