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THE IN-LAWS
by Peter Sobczynski
May 23, 2003
(Out of 4 stars)
FILM CREDITS: Written by Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon. Directed by Andrew Fleming. Starring Albert Brooks, Michael Douglas, Robin Tunney and Candice Bergen. Rated PG-13. 95 Minutes. A Warner Brothers release.
A couple of weeks ago, Albert Brooks made an appearance on David Letterman’s show and demonstrated once again that he is still arguably the funniest man in America. Unlike most other talk-show guests, who show up with nothing more on their mind than flogging their latest piece of product, Brooks tends to meticulously plan such appearances and his planned bit this time around was a doozy. He claimed that he was visiting a psychiatrist who told him that his problems stemmed from a lifetime of trying to amuse people and that for the sake of his mental health, he should refrain from trying to make people laugh-going so far as to provide Letterman with a series of ultra-serious questions to ask. Of course, these questions were so serious and dour that the audience couldn’t help but laugh and Brooks’ increasing level of frustration took the bit to even higher levels. It was classic Brooks-elegant, intelligently conceived and executed and wonderfully performed by Brooks. In other words, it was the complete opposite of "The In-Laws", the film he was promoting in the first place-a film so dreadfully unfunny that perhaps Brooks’ "psychiatrist" recommended that he take the role on the premise that no one watching it would be remotely inspired to do anything but cough and look away from the screen out of sheer embarrassment.
The film is a loose remake of the 1979 comedy of the same name that is quite simply one of the funniest American comedies ever made. The premise of the film was brilliantly simple; a neurotic father (Alan Arkin) meets the his prospective in-law (Peter Falk) and discovers that he is either a.) a CIA agent, b.) a rogue CIA agent planning on selling stolen Treasury printing plates to a banana republic (so they can print billions in counterfeit money) or c.) simply a raving lunatic. With too many highlights to point out here (I will mention only the hysterical first meeting between Arkin and Falk and the Castro-like dictator with a Senor Wences face on his hand and Leroy Neiman on his walls), "The In-Laws" is one of those rare comedies that never gets boring no matter how often you see it and while it wasn’t a giant hit on it’s initial release, it now has a large, loyal cult following (and to find a member of this cult, all you need to do is utter the word "Serpentine!"
This new version retains the same basic set-up; this time Brooks plays Jerry Peyser, the uptight control freak, and Michael Douglas is Steve Tobias, the brash international man of mystery. Once again, the dashing rogue involves the milquetoast in a strange series of adventures-this time, it appears that Steve is embroiled in a deal to sell a rogue Soviet submarine to a skeezy arms dealer (David Suchet). Much wackiness ensues (mostly when Jerry is mistaken for a famous assassin and catches the eye of the not-so-ambiguously-gay arms dealer) and by the end, the mismatched pair of dads finally begin to bond.
However, by trying to "improve" on the original, the writers and director Andrew Fleming (whose previous films include such minor gems as "The Craft" and the very funny "Dick") have added tons of new characters, subplots and other such nonsense and all that these additions do is demonstrate how unnecessary they truly are. For example, Steve is now saddled with two extra women in is life-his spy partner Angela (Robin Tunney), who wants to be in charge of a mission for once, and his ex-wife Judy (Candice Bergen), who breezes into the wedding with a monk in tow and a violent loathing of her former husband. And while the kids getting married were essentially an afterthought in the first film, this time the pair (Ryan Reynolds and Lindsay Sloane) get their own subplot in which the bride discovers that the groom may have slept with her maid of honor before they met. Oh, and if those additions weren’t enough, we also get endless scenes of Steve and Jerry wondering if they have been good parents to their issue over the years.
I do not object to the inclusion of these elements because they weren’t in the original film; I object to them because they are all pointless, unfunny and add nothing to the film but running time. They are standard bits of sitcom fodder that are utterly irrelevant to the main story and they look like they were trucked in wholesale from another movie. The kind of person who would actually find these moments entertaining is the same kind of person who would watch a Marx Brothers film for the harp solos.
If the digressions from the original are awful (and trust me, they are), then the moments that stick closer to the source are absolutely unforgivable. In a decision that strikes of absolute madness, the filmmakers has decided to abandon the entire conceit that Steve might not be a CIA agent and kick off the film with an elaborate sequence that wouldn’t seem out of place in a lesser James Bond film (the music playing over the scene , in fact, is "Live and Let Die"). Instead of having Jerry become suspicious of Steve because of the increasingly deranged stories he tells, he gets to watch Steve beat up enemy agents in a restaurant bathroom. Most idiotic, the finale abandons all notions of character-based comedy and collapses into a standard action sequence in which the two dads have to blow up the submarine, which is unaccountably floating in Lake Michigan and threatening the lakefront wedding.
While Douglas cruises through "The In-Laws" with the aura of a guy who has better things to do, Brooks is simultaneously the funniest and most depressing aspect of the whole enterprise. On the one hand, he is one of those actors who can sell even the most mediocre comedy dialogue and a couple of his line readings do inspire a smile or two (if you described a small catering firm as "a man and his wife and lettuce", you might not get a response but Brooks does) and one scene (in which he confronts a bathroom that might belong to Barbra Streisand) comes so close to genuine humor that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Brooks had a hand in writing it. The rest of the time, though, he flails about in a series of scenes that are all the more pathetic because they are being performed by someone of his stature-unless the mere idea of Albert Brooks in a thong strikes you as the height of hilarity. Let me put it this way; Albert Brooks made his cinematic debut in "Taxi Driver" and that film inspired more genuine laughs than this junk.
As an individual film, "The In-Laws" is a draggy mess that is mostly devoid of anything resembling humor. As a remake of a classic film, it is a monstrosity that removes all the with and charm of the original and replaces them with a cameo by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, which might seem like a lousy trade-off even to K.C. himself. The best thing about this remake is that it has inspired Warner Brothers to finally release the original on DVD-possibly under the assumption that anyone suckered into the remake will leave the multiplex in the mood for an actual comedy.
-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI
Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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