The Hard Way

THE HARD WAY
(R, Universal Pictures, 111 mins., Mar. 8, 1991)

Last year from around the time of this review, NBC took Michael J. Fox and his titular sitcom nationwide, only to renege on their investment the very next month. And that was heavy. Although the show's lukewarm critical reception and disappointing ratings seemed to reflect its early death, there was something refreshing about seeing Fox's return to showbiz, especially comedy. And it wasn't just his Family Ties/Back to the Future heyday which prompted such sentimentalism, but going as far back to 1991 and the buddy cop goof The Hard Way.

This modest Hollywood attempt at culture crash meta-humor from Stakeout director John Badham got a lot of mileage from Fox's insider position as a superstar. In The Hard Way, Fox plays a pampered blockbuster actor named Nick Lang, his net worth $1.2 billion dollars on the back of cartoonish capers like "Smoking Gunn," whose sequel is on the verge of premiering and is being heavily advertised across the country. "I'm the only one who wants me to grow up!" Lang bemoans in the midst of a temper tantrum that just saw him chuck his People's Choice Award at the TV screen which aired the trailer for "Smoking Gunn II."

Of course, the truth was that Fox himself had experienced such a desire to stretch out his range in the wake of lightweight star vehicles like the Back to the Future trilogy and The Secret of My Success. Fox registered a lower-key turn in Paul Schrader's Light of Day and followed them up in the next couple of years with Bright Lights, Big City and Brian De Palma's Casualties of War. The public image of him as Alex P. Keaton/Marty McFly continued to dog him despite his solid character work, especially in that De Palma film where he had to share scenes with Method-y steamroller Sean Penn. Penn is compelling, to be sure, but you couldn't imagine him anchoring something as whimsical as Doc Hollywood or sending up his own ego as Fox does in The Hard Way.

He may not have any Elvis in him, as Mojo Nixon doth protest, but Michael J. Fox has his own star quality and a healthy sense of self-effacement. And to me, that matters a whole lot in terms of establishing a solid presence.

Getting back to the set-up, Lang has his eyes set on a coveted role as gritty policeman Nick Casanov in an unnamed project (only glimpsed subtly before the end credits), though his agent Angie (Penny Marshall, sardonically sweet) doesn't see him as viable a candidate as, say, Mel Gibson. Lang's solution: to ingratiate himself into the life of a real hard-boiled cop and attain the necessary knowledge and motivation to give him the advantage. Just who is his mentor?

That would be Detective John Moss, NYPD, a live wire of a loner played by James Woods, as committed as ever but not above flashing his own witty credentials like a badge of honor. The film opens on Moss as he is rushing to meet a hot date whilst navigating the congestion of Times Square traffic, going so far as to break out his siren to clear a path. Alas, if it's not one thing, it's another, as Moss receives a bulletin related to the case of the Party Crasher (Stephen Lang), a quasi-vigilante thrill killer who assassinates various types in plain sight. His latest mark is a drug dealer at a disco, and he makes sure to phone 911 in advance because, as Moss states, "he craves attention."

Moss and his partners fail to prevent the murder, and the Crasher makes a break among the panicking crowd. When his vehicle is chained to a tow truck, he commandeers it for his getaway, though not without Moss hanging madly on the driver's side door. The Crasher makes quick work shaking off the squad cars and finally Moss, slamming him into an oversized cigarette.

And Nick Lang's face is puffing on it.

So you can imagine Moss's dismay at having to give up chasing the Crasher to break in Lang as his partner. "Not if you tied my tongue to your tailpipe and drove me 80 mph naked through a field of broken glass." Lang, in his best Serpico costume, awaits and admires the verisimilitude of the station: "It's like a movie, it's so real!" This eager beaver shadows his reluctant coach as he resumes the investigation against the orders of Captain Brix (Delroy Lindo), interrogating a street crew called the Dead Romeos (among them teenaged Dante Smith, aka Black Star rapper Mos Def) in hopes they'll rat on the gun manufacturer who sold the Crasher his hi-tech piece. Lang attracts the attention of a rival Hispanic gang and barges in on Moss, thus instigating a shoot-out.

Along the way, Lang desperately tries to convince Moss to let his guard down so he can glean some pertinent wisdom from this "Yoda among cops." The instinctive, embittered Moss rebuts this "Dickless Tracy" prima donna with some hard-hearted gravity of the situation. This is not an acting exercise, after all, and lives are constantly in the balance. But Lang sticks around, whether at the frog dog stand, at Moss's apartment or even the pizzeria where Moss meets prospective girlfriend Susan (Annabella Sciorra, the predecessor of Marisa Tomei) and her daughter Bonnie (10-year-old Christina Ricci).

Woods and Fox prove equally zesty in their conflicting commitments, reaching their joint apex in a riotous moment where Moss has gone to a bar to get the disastrous date, which saw him roughing up a quartet of obnoxious bankers (among them irascible comedian Lewis Black), out of his mind. The student tries to teach the confused, crusty romantic on how to best express himself to a lady. Lang gets into the role of Susan, with his legs crossed and shirt unbuttoned, and thus tries to engage Moss into conversation. It's a play-acting gig which mirrors the male duo's own contentious pairing, but is handled with superhuman precision from both leads, and the scene emphasizes character details (particularly Moss's unfounded jealousy and divorcee frostiness) over cheap laughs.

The script from Lem Dobbs (who co-wrote the story with Michael Kozoll) and Daniel Pyne is rich enough with bickering zingers and Hollywood satire. The opening mock-trailer for "Smoking Gunn II," a cross-pollination of Indiana Jones and James Bond adventures, is sharper than anything from Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder. And two key action sequences are well woven into the fabric of this fish-out-of-Evian commentary, first a shoot-out in a crowded theatre showing "Smoking Gunn II" and a "top of the world" final showdown utilizing a mechanical billboard for Lang's film, heralded by his warning about the "third act" in a vindictive plot. A lot of quirky satire is mined from the act of smoking cigarettes throughout and it culminates in spectacular fashion in the end.

The chemistry between Jimmy and Mikey is just as unexpectedly deft as the Dreyfuss/Estevez coupling from Stakeout, perhaps even more so given the vast gulf between their warring knowledge of reality. But John Badham also wants to preserve the film's more violent edginess, so the Party Crasher is presented as a grinning fanatic who justifies the murder of innocent civilians in his sanctimonious super-villainy. A crucial divide between Moss and Lang stems from the instillation of post-traumatic stress, testing their limits through the danger of wrongly spilled blood. And Lang's manic desire to establish his movie star commitment is lent gravity by a couple of sobering circumstances.

Badham tempers such distressing elements with the kind of pop culture savvy which dominated his Short Circuit, leading to the ultimate realization that for all his commitment, Lang's claim to adulthood is just him doing a Bruce Willis parody. There is a heavy Hitchcock hand to that aforementioned rooftop squabble, which calls attention to life imitating art even more bluntly. And in poking fun at Lang's narcissistic insularity, there is a gag involving subway riders which sticks one to the post-Bernie Goetz, post-Death Wish craze for ordinary outlaw heroes.

The essence of The Hard Way is just the pure entertainment value afforded to and delivered in spades by "hambone" savants Michael J. Fox and James Woods. This is their Midnight Run, albeit a less intriguing variation in terms of criminal antics, and they juice the screenplay for all its quippy, incompatible liquid gold. Coming at the end of a genre that was about to be the domain of lone wolves instead of the bumbling duos, Badham sees this trend off with more energy and efficiency than he would demonstrate in his straight sequel Another Stakeout. The Hard Way is easy going, to be true, but at least it's persistently, procedurally hilarious.

The cast also includes Conrad Roberts (The Serpent and the Rainbow) as the wheezy-voiced gun runner Witherspoon and, among many in Moss's precinct, John Capodice, Luis Guzman and LL Cool J, whose "Mama Said Knock You Out" inconspicuously opens and closes the film. Me personally, I prefer James Woods dusting off the old Max Renn wardrobe for his big Dirty Harry moment in the subway. "See you in Pittsburgh, punk."

The Wizard (1989)

THE WIZARD

(PG, Universal Pictures, 96 mins., theatrical release date: December 15, 1989)

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Ladies and gentlemen...

The year is 1988, and one movie proved the most influential in the history of cinema. It was an act of revolutionary proportions which changed the way Hollywood executives and all-American moviegoers perceived the idea of entertainment. It revived an art form diagnosed with rigor mortis with the defibrillator of imagination. Nowadays, it's still spoken about in hushed, revelatory tones by people who duly recognize a sacred totem when they see it, putting it on their must-see lists with the same awe reserved for the likes of Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Psycho, The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, or any number of beloved cultural benchmarks. The movie I refer to isn't Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Beetlejuice, no, for they are all but charlatans by comparison to the true figurehead of film in 1988.

Yes, the definitive cinematic event of that year was the one...

...the only...

...MAC AND ME!!!

What, you think I'm fooling? This isn't April 1, and my name ain't Marty Rantzen...you motherf***ers!

Paste Magazine recently unveiled their list of the 100 Best "B" Movies of All Time, and what movie holds the #52 spot on their countdown. Mac and Me! Forget Dolemite, Sharknado, Basket Case, or either the 1958 or 1988 version of The Blob. Hell, their list doesn't even think to include the likes of Pieces, Rock & Roll High School or anything associated with the name "Herschell Gordon Lewis." Who needs Mondo Macabro when you've got Sci-Fi Channel-era Mystery Science Theater 3000 as your encyclopedia of schlock! Yeah, I consider it a pretty lame list overall when you consider Mac and Me the middle man in the entire spectrum of "So Bad, It's Good."

But give that movie credit where it's due, for Mac and Me did do something audacious enough to deem it memorable: It made corporate sponsorship the bedrock of feature-film production. All of the Paul Rudd/Conan O'Brien hipster jokes in the world can not drown out the sadistic laughter of Ronald McDonald as he openly mocks your gullibility in assuming this was just another harmless E.T. clone. We all laugh at it now only to counter the repellent cynicism of the world's first feature-length commercial, and one designed mostly to shill for junk food and artificially-sweetened beverages. This is the in-flight entertainment for the those morbidly obese spaceship passengers from Wall-E.

(To be fair, though, maybe the laughter is designed help to burn off the calories from having eaten a Big Mac value meal. Healthy living!)

Mac and Me flopped on its lardass theatrically, and in an orderly universe, its failure should have become etched in stone and made the law of the land. That clearly didn't happen, because a year later, Nintendo committed the exact same mistake with The Wizard, another case of promo porno disguised as family fun.

Look, I get nostalgic for old-school Nintendo, too. The temptation to play Super Mario Bros. 1-3 or Bomberman or Bubble Bobble is like a pitifully codependent romantic relationship, only with bruised fingers instead of blackened eyes. But for the love of God, I watched The Wizard for the first time in years and I can't believe this has such a forgiving cult following. You'd think that the suits over at Nintendo would choose not to associate themselves with such a dour, dumb and derivative motion picture as The Wizard, a film distressingly preoccupied with irresponsible preteen runaways from broken homes, old men in Speedos (don't say I did not I warn you), and child molestation humor. Blecch!!! It would be like if Hollywood made a Britney Spears vehicle with cheap pretensions of being the female equivalent of a Lemon Popsicle film. 

Oh, wait...they did!

The premise revolves around an adorably autistic little boy named Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) desperate to run away to California, having just been spotted by the police treading lonely across the Utah desert and duly returned to his icy caregivers, Mr. and Mrs. Bateman (Wendy Phillips, Sam McMurray). The former convinces his wife that his stepson should be institutionalized, the only voice of protest being Jimmy's 13-year-old half-brother Corey (Fred Savage). Unable to sway his apathetic single father Sam (Beau Bridges) and older brother Nick (Christian Slater), Corey decides to run away from home and take Jimmy with him on a trip to, where else, but "Cawifornia."

Attempting to go a longer way than their $20 will allow, Corey perks up when Jimmy amasses a 50,000-point count on the Double Dragon arcade game in the bus station. A third party appears in the form of Haley (Jenny Lewis), a ginger-haired tomboy who fails to best Jimmy after making a wager but still tags along after pointing out that there is gold in them thar hills, namely the $50,000 first prize of the big Video Armageddon tournament happening in three days at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

The three underage hitchers/grifters pursue their destination, but not without a few necessary enemies in their path. The Batemans hire a sleazeball bounty hunter named Putnam (Will Seltzer) to retrieve Jimmy, and there's also the matter of one Lucas Barton (Jackey Vinson), an older teen and ultimate consumer...master of Nintendo who can presumably beat Lucas with one hand tied behind his back thanks to the miracle of gaming known as the Power Glove.

The introductory scene with Lucas is rightfully considered a moment of camp, thanks mostly in part to Vinson's zombie-like approach to playing a role meant to come across like an Old West bandit. The musical score even quotes Ennio Morricone briefly on the synthesizer, right before he utters his deathless recommendation of the junky Power Glove ("It's so bad"). It's futile to repress a chuckle there, just as much as it is hard not to applaud when Haley punches Corey in the face for acting more handicapped than his charge. Because the trouble with The Wizard is that by the 15-minute mark, I was already feeling inconsolably depressed.

Co-producer and sole screenwriter David Chisholm has written a story which brazenly incorporates Nintendo into nearly every intimate character moment. Nick tries to reach out to his absentee father whilst sharing a king bed in a motel only to hook up his NES console in frustration and start therapeutically playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The joke comes the next morning when Sam himself begins showing signs of vidiocy, boasting of "scroll weapons" and "mega-turtles." A heart-to-heart where Haley confesses her mother's gambling addiction and the desire for a better life for her trucker dad prompts Corey to forcibly equate her angst to The Legend of Zelda. And because this is another totem to cynical 1980s commercialism, there are two montages set to anemic dance-pop (Paul Carrack, no!) including an extended plug for the 1-900 Nintendo Power game tip hotline.

This is essentially a deification of an 8-bit cultural phenomenon comprised of two-bit filmmaking tactics. Just as Mac and Me perfunctorily leeched off E.T. for its hand-me-down plot, The Wizard reeks of a preteen plagiarism of the previous year's highest-grossing movie, Rain Man. Aside from the road trip seriocomedy and Jimmy's cloyingly precious mental illness, which is far less expressive than Raymond Babbitt, there's even a pit stop in a Reno casino in which the brothers and their Girl Friday amass a large sum of money at the craps table ($400, and their adult accomplice receives only a tenner...greedy little twits). There are also concessions made to the idiot savant of Tommy, the climactic studio lot chase from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (as well as their dinosaur park) and the truancy-tracking humiliations of Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The dreary sitcom mannerisms of Chisholm and director Todd Holland also eat away at the movie's lifeline. Whatever nuances and natural qualities Fred Savage brought to Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years are wasted on a petulant, dopey wet noodle of a leading role. Corey is too much of a whiny brat even in scenes of high drama, and the superficiality and sketchiness of the brothers' relationship leave Savage stranded. Luke Edwards as Jimmy fares little better, embodying all the worst qualities of Hollywood stereotypes of both cutesy-talk tykes and socially-stunted invalids. Just as unfortunate is the decision to counter the smart-alecky precocity of Corey and Haley, who speak less like contemporary children and more like 1940s screwball constructs, by reducing its adult population into nitwit adolescents. The Batemans may as well be pod people for all the sensitivity they present towards the obviously-traumatized Jimmy, and the less said about the imbecilic, sub-Dukes of Hazard road rivalry between boorish Sam and the weaselly Putnam, the better.

But it's all worth it once Jimmy makes it to Video Armageddon for the much-ballyhooed showdown and big reveal of the never-before-seen Super Mario Bros. 3, right? Wrong again. Holland's incompetence ruins this, too. For one, there's a surreal disconnect between what progress is charted by the tournament's overly-hammy MC and what is clearly happening on the screen. You don't need to have played Mario 3 as a child to see that "world 2" is actually "world 3" even though the info bar still lists it as "world 1." And the opportunity for tension in watching Raccoon Mario robbed of his power, a frustrating development in any Mario game, is completely wasted. It comes off like a half-assed attempt to turn a three-way gaming bout into a boxing match, with Corey and Haley screaming at Jimmy to "Get the star!" and "Find a warp!" to the point where you wish they'd just cut the crap and focus on the appealing novelty of seeing the game in a widescreen theatrical format.

The Wizard smacks of glib, dubious miscalculations from nearly all involved. It's joyless as an adventure, stuck in the mud as a celebration of the joystick and contrived to such unclean lengths that you'd swear the screenplay was written entirely in cheat codes. With the exception of the lively Jenny Lewis, who managed to parlay her kiddie spunk into a brilliant adult career as a singer-songwriter, everyone is stuck on cruise control, although Savage himself may actually the most guilty of that given the Rain Man associations. To be fair, Holland and Savage would actually go on to direct great episodic TV, respectably, with The Larry Sanders Show and Party Down. Such a second wind seems to have blown past Christian Slater and even the mighty Lucas himself, Jackey Vinson, whose real life registration as a sex offender makes Haley's spurious cry of "He touched my breast!" all the more queasy-making now.

At least Jimmy doesn't inspire mass breakdancing at the 7-11 just by beating the high score on Metroid. I'm trying to be more thankful for minor mercies.