(3) Maxie in a San Francisco leather bar;
(4) Nick preferring Maxie to boring old Jan;
(5) Nick being possessed by Maxie’s old boyfriend, who goes after her, only to find the boring yuppie, Jan, in his arms;
(6) Maxie enlisting her friends from the Other Side to possess everyone else at the office party, so that W. C. Fields is talking with Calvin Coolidge, etc.
I offer these possibilities only to illuminate the fact that Maxie does as little with its original inspiration as is humanly possible. This is the sort of movie where, if Maxie had any brains, she’d appear in Jan’s body, take one look at the script, and decide she was better off dead.
Medicine Man
(Directed by John McTiernan; starring Sean Connery, Lorraine Bracco; 1991)
All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together. Medicine Man, which is shot on location in the rain forests of the Amazon, has the great, grizzled Sean Connery as its star, doing research countless miles up an anonymous river with Lorraine Bracco, a tough-talking scientist from the Bronx. If this had been some dumb adventure movie it would probably have been terrific. Alas, it is a “relationship” movie, told along lines of timeworn weariness, and since that is not dreary enough it also throws in several Serious Issues for the characters to discuss.
Connery, first seen wearing an Indian headdress while thoroughly marinated in an intoxicating jungle potion, is an eccentric Scotsman who has been doing research by himself for so long that he has almost forgotten what pajamas look like. Bracco reminds him of them, and other things. She’s the head of the organization that is financing him, and responds to his call for a research assistant because she wants to find out what he’s doing out there in the jungle.
It goes, I think, almost without saying that Connery will resent a “girl” turning up as his helper, that Bracco will be a liberated woman, that they will fight, that together they will overcome great odds, and that eventually they will find themselves in each other’s arms. It also goes without saying that there will be a lot of snakes and ants in the jungle (and one mosquito—announced with a loud buzz on the sound track).
The ads for the movie have already revealed the story line (which, to be fair, is so elementary it can be summarized in a sentence). Connery has found the cure for cancer, but the mercenary villains who are burning and bulldozing the rain forest will soon destroy the only place on Earth where the ingredients for his rare cancer drug can exist. The plot is thickened because, once having concocted a miraculous overnight anticancer serum, Connery cannot repeat his experiment. His failure has him stumped, and Bracco, too, although not the audience, which is able to figure out what he’s doing wrong because of two clues that are as subtle as blows to the head.
There are some beautiful moments in Medicine Man. I enjoyed the freedom of the rope-and-pulley arrangement by which Connery is able to journey to the treetops. And the drollery of his dialogue, although it is interrupted by the screenwriter’s bizarre ideas of how Bracco should talk (“No boat! No boat!” she keeps shouting at one juncture, when Connery wants to send her home). The movie also has a perfect closing line (“Unbutton your shirt”), although it is typical of the filmmakers that they fail to recognize it as the closing line, and keep going.
Meet the Deedles
(Directed by Steve Boyum; starring Steve Van Wormer, Paul Walker, John Ashton; 1998)
The cult of stupidity is irresistible to teenagers in a certain mood. It’s a form of rebellion, maybe: If the real world is going to reject them, then they’ll simply refuse to get it. Using jargon and incomprehension as weapons, they’ll create their own alternate universe.
All of which is a tortuous way to explain Meet the Deedles, a movie with no other ambition than to create mindless slapstick and generate a series in the tradition of the Bill & Ted movies. The story involves twin brothers Stew and Phil Deedle (Steve Van Wormer and Paul Walker), slackers from Hawaii who find themselves in the middle of a fiendish plot to sabotage Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.
As the movie opens, Stew and Phil are hanging beneath a balloon being towed above the Hawaiian surf, while being pursued by a truant officer on a jet-ski. Soon they’re called on the carpet before their millionaire father (Eric Braeden), who snorts, “You will one day take over the entire Deedles empire—and you are surf bums!” His plan: Send them to Camp Broken Spirit, a monthlong experience in outdoor living that will turn them into men.
Through plot developments unnecessary to relate, the Deedles escape the camp experience, are mistaken for Park Ranger recruits, come under command of Ranger Pine (John Ashton), and stumble onto the solution to a mysterious infestation of prairie dogs.
Now prairie dogs can be cute, as anyone who has seen Disney’s The Living Prairie nature documentary can testify. But in large numbers they look alarmingly like herds of rats, and the earth trembles (slightly) as they scurry across the park. Why so many prairie dogs? Because an evil ex-Ranger named Slater (Dennis Hopper) has trained them to burrow out a cavern around Old Faithful, allowing him to redirect the geyser’s boiling waters in the direction of New Faithful, to which he plans to sell tickets.
Hopper lives in the cavern, relaxing in his E-Z-Boy recliner and watching the surface on TV monitors. His sidekicks include Nemo, played by Robert Englund, Freddy of the Nightmare on Elm Street pictures. At one point he explains how he trained the prairie dogs, and I will add to my permanent memory bank the sound of Dennis Hopper saying, “Inject kibble into the dirt, and a-tunneling they would go.” Study his chagrin when the Deedles employ Mentholatum Deep-Heat Rub as a weapon in this war.
While he schemes, the Deedles fumble and blunder their way through Ranger training, and Phil falls for Jesse (A. J. Langer), the pretty stepdaughter of Ranger Pine. There are a lot of stunts, involving mountains, truck crashes, and river rapids, and then the big showdown over Old Faithful. The Deedles relate to everything in surfer terms (plowing into a snowbank, they cry, “We’ve landed in a Slurpy!”).
I am prepared to imagine a theater full of eleven-year-old boys who might enjoy this movie, but I can’t recommend it for anyone who might have climbed a little higher on the evolutionary ladder. The Bill & Ted movies had a certain sly self-awareness that this one lacks. Maybe that’s a virtue. Maybe it isn’t.
Mercury Rising
(Directed by Harold Becker; starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin; 1998)
Mercury Rising is about the most sophisticated cryptographic system known to man, and about characters considerably denser than anyone in the audience. Sitting in the dark, our minds idly playing with the plot, we figure out what they should do, how they should do it, and why they should do it, while the characters on the screen strain helplessly against the requirements of the formula.
The movie begins with the two obligatory scenes of most rogue lawman scenarios: (1) Opening hostage situation, in which the hero (Bruce Willis) could have saved the situation if not for his trigger-happy superiors; (2) the Calling on the Carpet, in which his boss tells the lawman he’s being pulled off the job and assigned to grunt duty. “You had it—but the magic’s gone,” the boss recites. Willis’s only friend is a sidekick named Bizzi Jordan (Chi McBride), who has, as is the nature of sidekicks, a wife and child, so that the hero can gaze upon them and ponder his solitude.
Experienced moviegoers will know that in the course of his diminished duties, Willis (playing an FBI man named Jeffries) will stumble across a bigger case. And will try to solve it single-handedly, while he is the object of a police manhunt. And will eventually engage in a hand-to-hand struggle with the sinister man behind the scheme. This struggle will preferably occur in a high place (see “Climbing Villian,” from Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary). Plus, it’s a safe bet the hero will enlist a good-looking woman who will drop everything for a chance to get shot at while at his side.