The movie begins with a wicked satire on the opening scenes of Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger, as Ace desperately tries and fails to save a frightened raccoon, which slips from his grasp and falls off a mountain. Depressed by his failure, Ace goes to live in a Tibetan monastery (inspired by Rambo III). Then he is brought out of retirement by the mysterious disappearance of the sacred bat, which is the symbol of an African tribe.
The tribal scenes are not very funny, and one would say they are not tasteful, except that there is no connection between taste and any scene in an Ace Ventura movie. They reminded me of similar scenes in old B-movies where cannibals stirred pots full of missionaries. With just a little more effort, the sequences could have satirized Political Correctness rather than offending it. (There is an admirable scene where Ace is offended by a woman’s fur neckpiece, and in retaliation knocks out her escort and wears him around his neck.)
The supporting cast includes the invaluable Simon Callow, who, after wonderfully playing the friend who dies of a heart attack in Four Weddings and a Funeral, should have held out for something better than being sodomized by King Kong.
Carrey himself is so manic he makes Jerry Lewis look like a narcolepsy victim. There are laughs in the movie, and an anarchic tone that I admire. But there aren’t enough laughs, and the African tribal stuff doesn’t work, and by the end of the movie I was thinking, if this goes on any longer, he’s going to start sticking straws up his nose.
An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn
(Directed by Alan Smithee; starring Eric Idle, Ryan O’Neal; 1998)
An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn is a spectacularly bad film—incompetent, unfunny, ill conceived, badly executed, lamely written, and acted by people who look trapped in the headlights.
The title provides clues to the film’s misfortune. It was originally titled An Alan Smithee Film. Then Burn, Hollywood, Burn! Now its official title is An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn—just like that, with no punctuation. There’s a rich irony connected with the title. “Alan Smithee,” of course, is the pseudonym that Hollywood slaps on a film if the original director insists on having his name removed. The plot of AASFBHB involves a film so bad that the director wants his name removed, but since his real name is Alan Smithee, what can he do? Ho, ho.
Wait, it gets better. The movie was directed by Arthur Hiller, who hated the way the film was edited so much that, yes, he insisted his name be removed from the credits. So now it really is an Alan Smithee film. That leaves one mystery: Why didn’t Joe Eszterhas, the film’s writer, take off his name, too?
I fear it is because this version of the film does indeed reflect his vision. Eszterhas is sometimes a good writer, but this time he has had a complete lapse of judgment. Even when he kids himself, he’s wrong. “It’s completely terrible!” a character says of the film within the film. “It’s worse than Showgirls!” Of course Eszterhas wrote Showgirls, which got some bad reviews, but it wasn’t completely terrible. I was looking forward to explaining that to him this week, but he canceled his visit to Chicago, reportedly because his voice gave out. Judging by this film, it was the last thing to go.
Have you ever been to one of those office parties where the p.r. department has put together a tribute to a retiring boss? That’s how this film plays. It has no proper story line. No dramatic scenes. It’s all done in documentary form, with people looking at the camera and relating the history of a doomed movie named Trio, which cost more than $200 million and stars Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jackie Chan, who play themselves as if they are celebrity impersonators.
The film stars Eric Idle as Smithee, who eventually burns the print, and checks into the Keith Moon Psychiatric Institute in England (ho, ho). Ryan O’Neal plays the film’s producer. I love the way he’s introduced. We see the back of a guy’s head, and hear him saying, “Anything!” Then the chair swivels around and he says “anything!” again, and we see, gasp!—why, it’s Ryan O’Neal! I was reminded of the moment in Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days when the piano player swivels around, and, gasp! it’s—Frank Sinatra!
These actors and others recount the history of the doomed film in unconvincing sound bites, which are edited together without wit or rhythm. One is accustomed to seeing bad movies, but not incompetent ones. Sophomores in a film class could make a better film than this. Hell, I have a movie here by Les Brown, a kid who looks about sixteen and filmed a thriller in his mother’s basement, faking a fight scene by wrestling with a dummy. If I locked you in a room with both movies, you’d end up looking at the kid’s.
In taking his name off the film, Arthur Hiller has wisely distanced himself from the disaster, but on the basis of what’s on the screen I cannot, frankly, imagine any version of this film that I would want to see. The only way to save this film would be to trim eighty-six minutes.
Here’s an interesting thing. The film is filled with celebrities playing themselves, and most of them manifestly have no idea who they are. The only celebrity who emerges relatively intact is Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, who plays a private eye—but never mind the role, just listen to him. He could find success in voice-over work.
Now consider Stallone. He reappears in the outtakes over the closing credits. Such cookies are a treat for audiences after the film is over. Here they’re as bad as the film, but notice a moment when Stallone thinks he’s off camera, and asks someone about a Planet Hollywood shirt. Then he sounds like himself. A second later, playing himself, he sounds all wrong. Jackie Chan copes by acting like he’s in a Jackie Chan movie, but Whoopi Goldberg mangles her scenes in a cigar bar, awkwardly trying to smoke a stogie. It’s God’s way of paying her back for telling Ted Danson it would be funny to wear blackface at the Friars’ Club.
Alien Resurrection
(Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman; 1997)
Between Alien and Aliens, fifty-seven years passed, with Ellen Ripley in suspended animation. Between Aliens and Alien3, she drifted through space in a lifeboat, before landing on a prison planet. In all three films she did battle with vile alien creatures constructed out of teeth, green sinew, and goo. In Alien3 she told this life form: “I’ve known you so long I can’t remember a time when you weren’t in my life.”
I’m telling the aliens the same thing. This is a series whose inspiration has come, gone, and been forgotten. I’m aliened out. The fourth movie depends on a frayed shoestring of a plot, barely enough to give them something to talk about between the action scenes. A “Boo Movie,” Pauline Kael called the second one, because it all came down to aliens popping up and going “boo!” and being destroyed.