Double Take
(DIRECTED BY GEORGE GALLO; STARRING ORLANDO JONES, EDDIE GRIFFIN; 2001)
Double Take is the kind of double-triple-reverse movie that can drive you nuts because you can’t count on anything in the plot. Characters, motivations, and true identities change from scene to scene at the whim of the screenplay. Finally, you weary of trying to follow the story. You can get the rug jerked out from under you only so many times before you realize the movie has the attention span of a gnat, and thinks you do, too.
Orlando Jones stars as Daryl Chase, a businessman who becomes the dupe of a street hustler named Freddy Tiffany (Eddie Griffin). The movie opens with Daryl as the victim of a complicated briefcase-theft scam, which turns out not to be what it seems, and to involve more people than it appears to involve. Freddy is at the center of it, and Daryl soon learns that Freddy will be at the center of everything in his life for the rest of the movie.
Who is this guy? He seems to have an almost supernatural ability to materialize anywhere, to know Daryl’s secret plans, to pop up like a genie, and to embarrass him with a jive-talking routine that seems recycled out of the black exploitation pictures of the 1970s. The movie’s attitudes seem so dated, indeed, that when I saw a computer screen, it came as a shock: The movie’s period feels as much pre-desktop as it does pre-taste.
Freddy embarrasses Daryl a few more times, including during a fashion show, where he appears on the runway and shoulders aside the models. Meanwhile, Daryl discovers he is under attack by mysterious forces, for reasons he cannot understand, and to his surprise Freddy turns out to be an ally. The obnoxious little sprite even helps him out of a dangerous spot in a train station by changing clothes with him, after which the two men find themselves in the dining car of a train headed for Mexico. The switch in wardrobe of course inspires a switch in personalities; Freddy orders from the menu in a gourmet-snob accent, while Daryl is magically transformed into a ghetto caricature who embarrasses the waiter by demanding Schlitz Malt Liquor.
And so on. Wardrobes, identities, motivations, and rationales are exchanged in a dizzying series of laboriously devised “surprises,” until we find out that nothing is as it seems, and that isn’t as it seems, either. It’s not that we expect a movie like this to be consistent or make sense. It’s that when the double-reverse plotting kicks in, we want it to be funny or entertaining or anything but dreary and arbitrary and frustrating.
The movie was directed by George Gallo, who wrote the much better Midnight Run and here again has latched onto the idea of a nice guy and an obnoxious one involved in a road trip together. One of his problems is with Eddie Griffin. Here is a fast-thinking, fast-talking, nimble actor who no doubt has good performances in him, but his Freddy Tiffany is unbearable—so obnoxious he approaches the fingernails-on-a-blackboard category. You know you’re in trouble when your heart sinks every time a movie’s live-wire appears on the screen. I realized there was no hope for the movie, because the plot and characters had alienated me beyond repair. If an audience is going to be entertained by a film, first they have to be able to stand it.
Down to Earth
(DIRECTED BY CHRIS WEITZ AND PAUL WEITZ; STARRING CHRIS ROCK, REGINA KING; 2001)
Down to Earth is an astonishingly bad movie, and the most astonishing thing about it comes in the credits: “Written by Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, Ali LeRoi, and Louis C.K.” These are credits that deserve a place in the Writer’s Hall of Fame, right next to the 1929 version of The Taming of the Shrew (“screenplay by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”).
Yes, Chris Rock and his writing partners have adapted Elaine May’s Oscar-nominated 1978 screenplay for Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty falls more in the Sam Taylor category). It wasn’t broke, but boy, do they fix it.
The premise: Lance Barton (Rock) is a lousy stand-up comic, booed off the stage during an amateur night at the Apollo Theater. Even his faithful manager, Whitney (Frankie Faison), despairs for him. Disaster strikes. Lance is flattened by a truck, goes to heaven, and discovers from his attending angel (Eugene Levy) that an error has been made. He was taken before his time. There is a meeting with God, aka “Mr. King” (Chazz Palminteri), who agrees to send him back to Earth for the unexpired portion of his stay.
The catch is, only one body is available: Mr. Wellington, an old white millionaire. Lance takes what he can get and returns to Earth, where he finds a sticky situation: His sexpot wife (Jennifer Coolidge) is having an affair with his assistant, who is stealing his money. Meanwhile, Lance, from his vantage point inside Mr. Wellington, falls in love with a young African-American beauty named Suntee (Regina King).
Let’s draw to a halt and consider the situation as it now stands. The world sees an old white millionaire. So does Suntee, who has disliked him up until the point where Lance occupies the body. But we in the audience see Chris Rock. Of course, Rock and Regina King make an agreeable couple, but we have to keep reminding ourselves he’s a geezer, and so does she, I guess, since soon they are holding hands and other parts.
The essential comic element here, I think, is the disparity between the two lovers, and the underlying truth that they are actually a good match. Wouldn’t that be funnier if Mr. Wellington looked like … Mr. Wellington? He could be played by Martin Landau, although, come to think of it, Martin Landau played an old white millionaire who gets involved with Halle Berry and Troy Beyer in B.A.P.S. (1997), and don’t run out to Blockbuster for that one.
The real problem with Mr. Wellington being played by an old white guy, even though he is an old white guy, is that the movie stars Chris Rock, who is getting the big bucks, and Chris Rock fans do not want to watch Martin Landau oscillating with Regina King no matter who is inside him. That means that in the world of the movie everyone sees an old white guy, but we have, like, these magic glasses, I guess, that allow us to see Chris Rock. Well, once or twice we sort of catch a glimpse of the millionaire, in reflections and things, but nothing is done with this promising possibility.
The story then involves plots against and by Mr. Wellington, plus Lance’s scheming to get a better replacement body, plus Suntee being required to fly in the face of emotional logic and then fly back again, having been issued an emotional round-trip ticket. If I were an actor, I would make a resolution to turn down all parts in which I fall in and out of love at a moment’s notice, without logical reason, purely for the convenience of the plot.
Chris Rock is funny and talented, and so I have said several times. I even proposed him as emcee for the Academy Awards (they went for an old white millionaire). This project must have looked promising, since the directors are the Weitz brothers, Chris and Paul Weitz, fresh from American Pie. But the movie is dead in the water.
Dreamcatcher
(DIRECTED BY LAWRENCE KASDAN; STARRING MORGAN FREEMAN, THOMAS JANE; 2003)
Dreamcatcher begins as the intriguing story of friends who share a telepathic gift and ends as a monster movie of stunning awfulness. What went wrong? How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong? How could even Morgan Freeman, an actor all but impervious to bad material, be brought down by the awfulness? Goldman, who has written insightfully about the screenwriter’s trade, may get a long, sad book out of this one.