FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Why vs. why
Vintage Bill Murray stuck in stale, one-joke premise
by Robert TarryThe Man Who Knew Too Little
Directed by Jon Amiel
Starring Bill Murray, Peter Gallagher, Joanne Whalley, Alfred MolinaYou can't make fun of something that's already lame. It's the reason why Spy magazine doesn't spoof the Enquirer and why no televangelist sketch is ever funny.
Spoofing spy movies? That's right up there with ridiculing the handicapped: it's not very funny and it's been done. Besides, James Bond movies have long since passed the point of self-parody to become merely sad.
Regardless, The Man Who Knew Too Little plows onward.
The set up is tee-ball simple: Bill Murray (comic genius) is Wallace Ritchie, an American schlep in London given a ticket to an avant-garde "Theatre Of Life" performance. For the price of admission, participants wander the streets of London interacting with actors paid to provide intrigue. Except Wallace gets tangled in a real web of international intrigue and he doesn't know it!
Therein lies the hilarity.
Wallace stumbles from one "scene" to the next, playing the "role" of a hitman, ad-libbing the "script" as he goes along. I'm using a "lot" of "quotes" here because the whole "movie" has that whole "nudge-nudge," "wink-wink" "get it?" approach to comedy used by "genuinely" funny people forced to tell an average "joke" - and it's the same average joke over and over.
Murray's done this before, but at least in Groundhog Day he was trapped in a one-joke comedy on purpose. With The Man Who Knew Too Little, it's more like an unplanned side-effect - like dizziness or loss of appetite.
He gives it the old college try, delivering more than a few good laughs (mostly of the chuckle variety), and is, in fact, funnier than he's been in years.
It's the movie surrounding him that blows.
Besides Murray, the rest of the comedy is subtle, to the point of not really being there at all. Joanne Whalley (née Kilmer) plays Lori, an ex-call girl blackmailing the British defense minister, and get this! it's the exact same character she played in the 1989 movie Scandal. Hi-larious! The other cast members have even less to work with, playing dull Cold War stereotypes like bumbling Russian hit men.
Disappointing for comedy fans, but coming soon: a hilarious, madcap send-up of those old TV shows from the '50s. Fuh-ny!
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