Film number 11 – Wise Guys
Beginning with those classic cheesy opening titles you know what you’re in for. Titles and names are shot full of holes and spun around all with authentic period arcade sounds. Danny DeVito and Joe Piscapo star in this screwball gangster genre send up and amazingly this is also directed by the great Brian De Palma.
The plot concerns the two leads as low down mafia stooges doing odd and dirty jobs for the scary boss (Played by Dan Hedaya), after completely botching a simple task to make a bet on a horse. De Vito and Piscapo now owe two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and must go on the run escaping numerous assassination attempts. They eventually form a slight alliance with a casino owner (Harvey Keitel) and everything works out in the end. My lack of enthusiasm describing the plot is because it’s not very strong, an interesting project for De Palma, it is hard to remember that he is not solely a gangster movie director. Before Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables he made the horror style musical Phantom of Paradise and the black comedy Hi Mom, and even with this range of genres Wise Guys still feels very out of the ordinary. The back and forth between the two leads is slapstick and goofy and set in a world very much aware of its source material. For instance when the boss asks DeVito to start his car and the camera makes a very slow 360 pan showing the entire population of the street dispersing at speed, Buster Keaton style all terrified of the obvious and imminent explosion. This is just a small example of the almost parody tone of the film, all action scenes play out in the kind of slapstick methodology that are reminiscent of films like The Pink Panther and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
The plotting and journey of the characters are two things that are absolutely essential to these kinds of road/ chase movies and in this film the events are quite boring. The threat of danger is never very strong and places the characters visit stop any thing exciting or fun from really happening. The story reaches a conclusion quite quickly and makes you quite annoyed for wasting your time and breath hoping that something amazing was going to happen.
The thing that will keep you invested in the film is how much you patience you posses for its two main characters, I personally love watching DeVito in just about anything but can admit that this film isn’t easy to get through. The tone and writing are very inconsistent; the characters share huge dreams of opening the first Italio- Judeo Restaurant/ Deli yet make the stupid mistake of losing all the bosses money on a horse race. This is also a big problem with the movie, the fact that they lose all the money purely through their own decision is why they are never very empathetic and this really hurts the light hearted slapstick feeling that the film aims for. Brian De Palma is obviously trying to have a lot of fun here and there are wonderful moments of humor like the grandmother keeping millions of dollars under the mattress and the fowl mouthed obese stooge played by Captin Lou Albano but these are very few and far between. The culmination of events at the end is quite uneventful and dull, it could have really save the film and let it end on a high note but is just as uneven as the rest of the material.
Whilst not being a waste of time I can’t say this was a must see film, There was a whole sting of these kind of farcical gangster spoof comedies in the late eighties and early nineties with films like Johnny Dangerously, The Freshmen and My Blue Heaven and none of them were very notable, successful or memorable. It’s a shame the film could have been really strong but just barely made a mark.
5 out of 10
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