#9 in my ranking of Ivan Reitman’s filmography.
This feels like a compromise film for Ivan Reitman. It’s a continued use of established film stars in a comedy, but with a much looser script that allows them to play around for longer stretches. However, instead of comedy, the film runs on charm. It’s nice for good lengths of time, but it has this extremely obvious tension between different script ideas cobbled together in order to find a way to get an action-themed ending and pad out the thin idea to feature length. I mean, I can easily imagine how to make a full length film out of two completely different twins discovering each other as the result of a science experiment by the federal government, it’s just not a crowd-pleasing box office winner that became one of the biggest films of 1988.
Julius Benedict (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is the perfect example of humanity as created in a lab. Intelligent, well-read, physically fit, and perpetually upbeat, he’s told by his scientist mentor, Werner (Tony Jay), that he had a twin brother who was left in Los Angeles at their births. This is Vincent (Danny DeVito), short, squat, and dedicated only to his next con. They meet up, discover that their mother did not actually die upon their birth as Julius was told, and Julius drags Vincent along in his quest to find her. The only reason that Vincent goes along is because where their mother is supposed to be is on the way to Houston where he is going to deliver a special engine he found in a car he stole for a $5 million payday.
So, the film is essentially two in one: Julius and Vincent having their own meet-cute and traveling cross-country with Vincent’s girlfriend Linda (Chloe Webb) and her sister Marnie (Kelly Preston), and the pursuit by the killer Webster (Marshall Bell). Webster provides the tension for the plot, but it’s purely for the audience. Julius and Vincent don’t even know he’s on their tail until very late in the film. It provides this easy-going tone to most of the film where Schwarzenegger and DeVito get to be charming.
And there’s real appeal to that. Schwarzenegger playing this wide-eyed innocent as he discovers the real world in a fish out of water tale, having a pretty girl hit on him, and discovering his past is fun. DeVito plays the scumbag discovering a heart of gold well. They play off of each other amusingly. It’s nice. It’s not deep. It’s not terribly compelling, but the bulk of this film is nice.
It just clashes with this subplot of Webster out to kill them. Which they don’t even know is happening for most of the film. This bothers me less during the bulk of the film than when the two strand finally intertwine in the final act. It just feels so out of place to put this action, death-defying ending on the end of a comedy that never felt like it had more than emotional stake and some lightly comedic physical stakes in the form of the three gangster brothers out to get $20,000 from Vincent whom Julius dispatches with ease more than once. I feel like things would have meshed better if one more rewrite on the script had made it so that they were on the run, maybe Vincent lies about not knowing why they’re being chased, and their mother’s location is on the other side of Houston, not the near side. It can give you a better balance of goofy scenes of the brothers and their girls as they think they’re out of danger mixed with more dangerous scenes of them in danger combined with tension around Vincent revealing his secret. It feels more standard and straightforwardly delivered, but also just better integrated.
But the final product isn’t bad. It’s just kind of a mesh of different ideas not done that well while the bulk of the film is carried by likeable leads well within their acting ranges. It’s kind of prime-80s product with a high concept, stars to sell it, and even a theme song. Reitman himself largely disappears behind his stars and the concept, managing the set well and getting the right amount of comedic and nicely digestible material for a mass audience. To connect it to the dominant threads of his early career, Vincent represents the slob, but the slob isn’t right at all. He doesn’t win the day except by at least partially turning away from it. I always suspected that the celebration of the slob wouldn’t last too long in Reitman’s career, but it’s kind of surprising to see it effectively dead already.
Originally published here
English (US) · 