Friday, February 28, 2014

Mr. Nanny

Michael Gottlieb, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 7%

This movie stars Terry "Hollywood" "Hulk" Hogan as an over-the-hill pro wrestler who takes a job as a bodyguard to earn some extra cash. If you replace "bodyguard" with "actor" in that last sentence, the universe will collapse in on itself.

The Hulkster plays Sean Armstrong, who spends his days fishing and being tormented by disturbingly brutal flashbacks to his wrassling days. His best friend and former manager, Sherman Hemsley (I don't remember or care what this character's actual name was), has taken to managing a security company, and he needs Sean's help. Sherman has a new client, a wealthy computer engineer named Mason who has invented a device to control ICBMs or something, and for some reason only Sean is capable of protecting him.

What Sean doesn't expect is that the job also requires him to babysit Mason's sadistic hellspawn children. (He probably also didn't expect Mason to be played by the stammering public defender from My Cousin Vinny.) These children miss their deceased mother and have a strained relationship with their father, which causes them to act out by playing Home Alone style deathtrap pranks on all of their babysitters, including Sean. At one point, the dialogue seems to suggest that they are genuinely trying to murder him, but of course Hulk Hogan is indestructible, so it doesn't work.

Hollywood finally manages to straighten out all the family's problems by shouting a lot and uttering some very inspiring speeches about values. But after Mason reconciles with his children, he is called away on a business trip that turns out to be a plot on his life. His head of security has been hired by a sinister megalomaniac with a metal cranium and the inauspicious name of Thanatos, who wants to kill Mason and take the top-secret missile-launching microchip for himself.

At about this same point, Sean is joined by Sherman Hemsley, who recounts to the little children the story of how he was shot while protecting Sean from a gangster who tried to fix Wrestle-Mania. What an unbelievable coincidence that the gangster was none other than Thanatos, who apparently runs the gamut from bookmaking to international terrorism. We learn that Thanatos got his chrome-dome after falling from a rooftop during his fight with Sean and Sherman.

Somehow or other, the heroes learn that Mason has been kidnapped by Thanatos, so the movie suddenly shifts gears from goofy slapstick comedy to goofy action thriller. Sean and the kids find Thanatos's evil lair, the Hulkster kicks every ass in sight, and the plucky kids use one of their booby-traps to electrocute Thanatos and launch him 500 feet into the air. His metal plate skull falls back down to earth, so I think it's an inescapable conclusion that two children have just killed a mobster in a PG-rated movie. Sherman Hemsley finds it hilarious: "He really blew his top!"

I saw this movie when I was eight or nine, and I remember being surprised at how much of an action movie it was. Based on the trailers, I definitely wasn't expecting anyone's skull to fall off. But what's most disturbing, looking back on it, is the kids. They far surpass Kevin McCallister in terms of juvenile psychopathy.

And another thing—apart from the scene that was in every trailer, where Hulk Hogan wears a tutu, very little was done with the premise of a pro wrestler playing nanny to little kids.

This is a bad movie.

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