Tommy Boy (1995)

Director: Peter Segal

Cast: Chris Farley, David Spade, Bo Derek, Brian Dennehy

Have I Seen it Before: Experiencing the main crux of my adolescence in the mid-90s, it was essentially required viewing. At some point, I had recorded an airing off of HBO, and I probably watched it more than I strictly had to.

Then again, I have the strongest memory of being no more than twelve, seeing Farley during an appearance on The Tonight Show and saying out loud. “Well, he’s not going to live very long.”

I was a weird kid, though.

Did I Like It: Generally accepted to be Farley’s greatest movie, I couldn’t help but wonder if that said more about the shortness of his career than anything else. Could it hold up after all of these years? Could anything?

Probably not. The film is 90 minutes of warmed over Capra-esque aww-shucks-ness with a few moments of Farley being Farley to fill the trailers and get the opening weekend grosses up. Farley can be funny, but after being on a bit of a Saturday Night Live jag lately after the one-two punch of the show’s 50th anniversary coupled with last year’s Saturday Night (2024) I think I’ve come to the conclusion that Farley’s manic energy could never be correctly captured by a feature film. It needed to be on display in live TV, where one could see him become a tornado, and then have to ask themselves whether or not they really saw what they just saw. Farley excelled at that. It’s what elevated him from just another featured player on the show, and that quality might have had some part in killing him.

Then again, I could be wrong. Had he lived, Farley might have found layers we never knew he had. If that had been the case, this film might have been forgotten altogether. It certainly wouldn’t hold up.

Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)

Director: Peter Segal

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson

Have I Seen It Before?: I wrote in my review of The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) that the first two films in the series had largely conflated to the point where I was not sure I had seen either of the films all the way through at all. Here, I have no memory of the film that plays out and am reasonably sure I’ve never seen it at all.

Did I like it?: And I’m not necessarily sure that I was missing much.

Things open well enough with an extended homage to Battleship Potemkin (1925). Okay, it’s actually an extended reference to The Untouchables (1987), but I’m trying to give the film credit for at least aping a film that itself was aping high art. I also spent a few moments wondering how they managed to get a camera inside of a pinball machine for the ubiquitous police siren opening titles, but sometimes its best to let the magic of cinema wash over you.

From there, I’m witness to only a few moments of mirth. In fact, the biggest laugh the film got out of me was a throw-away gag where the words “Police Squad” were painted in different directions on a door window, so that only one words looked backwards. The non-sequiturs fly amusingly at the climax staged against the Academy Awards, but that’s slim pickings, if you ask me. Just a few lines from Anna Nicole Smith, and I’m immediately stuck by how much I underestimated Priscilla Presley’s competence as a film actress. It definitely doesn’t help that it is revealed at the end that her character has a penis, which inspires Drebin to become physical sick. With this film and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), what the hell was with 1994? That doesn’t even begin to cover the O.J. Simpson of it all.

One can’t help but wonder if this film was the first step in the long slow decline that was the career of Leslie Nielsen. Oh well, we’ll always have Airplane (1980) and for that matter, Forbidden Planet (1956).