Director: Harold Ramis
Cast: Robert de Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palmentieri
Have I Seen It Before: Oh sure. It was one of those R-rated movies that my parents let me see in those scant few years before I could just bypass their authority altogether.
Did I Like It: Back in those days when watching the movie was a special treat, I thought it was tremendous, causing me to put the movie in the same class as Ramis' work on Ghostbusters (1984) and especially Groundhog Day (1993). I kinda wanted to be Harold Ramis, if I'm being honest. A purveyor of funny comedies whose scripts actually work plot-wise. This was before his eventual petering out with duds like Bedazzled (2000) and Year One (2009), and certainly before subsequent Ghostbusters movies became occasions to memorialized him.
As a critic, one doesn't want to let the variables of one's own mood or environment, but I'm going to say that it was probably a bad idea to watch this film immediately after watching The Godfather (1972). But it’s also not a great idea that the film wants to invite all of those comparisons. Sobol’s (Crystal) dream sequence where he is Marlon Brando and Vitti (De Niro) is John Cazale during the assassination attempt in the earlier film not only smacks of self-reference via identification only and forgetting to bring some sort of commentary to the proceedings. It also highlights that Coppola and his cinematography Gordon Willis can be frequently mimicked, but rarely captured*.
The rest of the film leans to heavily on the personalities of its two stars to really ever succeed on its own terms. De Niro leans into the monosyllabic and Crystal spills forth with schtick that I want to remind them both that they’re not suffering through a talk show appearance or hosting the Oscars.
For all the good it might do them.
*Boy, that one scene in Barbie (2023) really had my number, didn’t it?