Runtime: 88 minutes
Directed by: Mark L. Lester
Starring: John Candy, Eugene Levy, Robert Loggia, Kenneth McMillin, Meg Ryan
From: Columbia
Yesterday being the 30th anniversary of John Candy’s passing spurned my viewing choices last night. A mutual on Twitter retweeted a message from John’s son Chris noting the anniversary. Millions my age are still big fans of his due to all of his movies that were popular w/ kids at the time. That death is even sadder when you think about two children losing a dad and a wife her husband… for me it’s realizing he was only 43, which is now my age. Out of all the movies, this was selected because someone on a messageboard discussed it several days ago. He was a fan, in part due to its 80’s weirdness that I’ll mention later.
Candy plays a police officer who lost his job after being set up by dirty cops (insert your own comments if you wish) and Eugene Levy is a lousy lawyer who is told by a judge to find a new line of work. Both become security guards, who of course are of the bumbling variety. They have to pay union dues; the union bosses are Brion James AND Jonathan Banks. For fans of 80’s flicks, is it really a spoiler to suggest that you should be wary of characters portrayed by either actor, let alone those two together?
Then again, there are other faces known for playing untrustworthy at best characters: Robert Loggia, Tiny Lister, Jr., James Tolkan. What a cast this has: there’s also Meg Ryan as the main love interest, Tony Burton, Don Stroud, and Steve Railsback as an amazing OOT character for a few minutes during the finale. It is a silly, slight movie which improbably was the follow-up to Commando for Mark L. Lester. Some of the humor is dated (after all, a scene at a sex shop goes about as you’d expect, including a minor character straight out of the Ramrod and at one point, Candy plays Peeping Tom through a keyhole at Ryan changing clothes! Then again, those moments could have been FAR more tasteless, yet were not) yet I laughed enough to the point that I can consider this “fine.”
Or, perhaps it is me tickled pink at how 80’s this was at times. The soundtrack (somehow w/ the contributions of Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire!) has songs from Atlantic Starr & Sigue Sigue Sputnik and a scene is at a gym/aerobics facility. The movie is also rather peculiar at times; besides getting to see Candy fire a BFG (claimed to be a .50 cal but in truth was something slightly smaller), there’s Tito Puente as himself performing Oye Como Va out of nowhere in one scene-he wrote the song, not anyone in Santana-Candy punching a dog then a woman in self-defense, Levy romancing Ryan, etc.
It wasn’t the best that could come from an SCTV reunion-Harold Ramis wasn’t happy with the end product so he wanted no one to know he was a producer & one of the writers; only the former credit was excised. My enjoyment of 80’s films in general made me think that this was fine, warts & all. To think that there are multiverses out there where this movie would have starred Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (the script is that old), or Candy and Tom Hanks reuniting, or that John Carpenter almost directed the film.
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