Word: murrays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...posters are enough to make your heart sink: another "screwball comedy" with Bill Murray carrying the whole cast. Will it be another Kingpin, where Bill's comb-over and fringed vest are the last vestiges of laughability in what has remade the paradigm of a really bad movie...
...Thankfully, Murray's latest is nothing of the sort, and is instead an altogether humorous and clever film alternately mocking conventions of the Cold War, James. Bond espionage thrillers and the theater itself, along with more pratfalls than even Chevy Chase could dream...
...premise sounds surely irritating, but the final product betrays the trite-sounding plot line. Wallace Ritchie (Bill Murray) is a high school actor whose ambitions landed him smack dab behind the counter of his local Blockbuster video store. His brother (Peter Gallagher of sex, lies and videotape fame), on the other hand, is a smooth talking well-dressed I-banker in London. Wallace decides to drop in on his brother for his birthday (thankfully Gallagher saves us a reprise of his recent flop To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday). The brother, James, freaks, being on the cusp of a multimillion...
...though, he has received the call intended for a government hit man, expected to help with a plan to destabilize the Anglo-Russian detente whose peace treaty is to be signed that evening. What ensues is Hitchcock's "wrong man" scenario, but with humor instead of horror, and Bill Murray instead of Cary Grant...
...evening begins with Murray being mugged by two street punks, whom Murray misidentifies as part of this grand theatrical scheme. He forces them to redo the scene in several genres, with one emotional performance nearly reducing them to tears. Then he gives the befuddled youths his wallet, letting them run off, shouting "I want that back at the end of the show." But, even this gag would get old by the end of the film, so the movie is not solely powered by this idea that life only affords one take...