Rotten Tomatoes score: 13%
My usual process for writing a review is to search first for a picture, then for the Wikipedia article. That helps me determine the year of release and the director, and I can refresh my memory about any plot points I've forgotten. Wikipedia also usually reports the Rotten Tomatoes rating, generally under the heading "Reception" or "Release", which is nice because it saves me a trip. But this time, the Reception section is more concise: "Box Office: The movie was not a success." The citation is to a Los Angeles Times article reporting on the breakout success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I'll have to get around to that some day), which is Wikipedia's only reference for the article.
That's not an auspicious start.
I had never seen or even heard of this movie until 2012, so I guess its reputation has not improved with the passage of time. But I'll bet before its release, people expected it to be a hit. Don't forget, when Wayne's World came out in 1992, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers were both medium-sized stars. That's hard to imagine today, since Myers became a household name with Austin Powers, and Carvey totally dropped out of the spotlight after he left Saturday Night Live. But in 1990, Dana Carvey was considered a really funny guy.
Opportunity Knocks opens on the summertime streets of Chicago, where Eddie (Dana Carvey) and his friend Lou scam two hundred bucks off a reckless driver by doing the old "actually getting hit by a car" con. You know, the old con game where one guy steps into the street and deliberately gets hit by a car, then the other guy comes along and scares the driver into making an on-the-spot settlement. Unfortunately for Eddie and Lou, a loan shark is waiting for them at home. He takes all their money and demands another $700 by tomorrow.
To get the money together, they try the old "pretending to be men from the gas company while you steal a TV from an occupied home" con, but the householder's karate student sons chase them away. Desperate, Lou insists that they graduate from con artists to burglars, and they break into a luxurious suburban home. Inside, they overhear a phone message from a Harvard graduate named Jonathan, reporting that he won't be able to house-sit for the homeowner David (whose answering machine greeting announces for all the world to hear that he's in India for two months).
Unable to pay their debt, the guys arbitrarily decide to steal and trash a car, only to discover it belongs to Sal Nichols (James Tolkan), a local crime boss. They ditch the car, but by the time Nichols locates it, someone has come along and stolen the $60,000 he had stashed in the trunk. Now the heat is really on, so Eddie runs back to rich guy David's to sweat it out. And who should come along the next morning but David's parents Mona and Milt Malkin (Doris Belack and Robert Loggia), who of course mistake Eddie for Jonathan, the Ivy League house-sitter.
So here we are, back in one of my favorite 1990s comedy genres: the "crook pretends to be a decent guy and then becomes a decent guy in spite of himself" movie. Milt, who owns a company that makes restroom air-dryers, is so impressed with "Jonathan" that he hires him to be vice president of marketing. Meanwhile, Eddie for some reason decides that his best bet for getting close to the Malkin fortune is to run a "love con" on Milt's daughter Annie. I have no idea why that would make sense, but it serves the useful purpose of shoehorning an obligatory romantic subplot into the story.
And while that story is rolling toward its predestined conclusion, Nichols the mob boss returns to take his money out of Eddie's hide. Eddie cracks Milt Malkin's safe to pay him off, but then he cons Nichols into giving the money back in a convoluted plot twist that results in Nichols' arrest for destroying an IRS building. Why was this mobster character necessary for the movie? I know they needed a plot device to motivate Eddie to masquerade as a Harvard graduate, but why wasn't the loan shark from act one good enough?
Well, whatever. Eventually, the story comes to a contrived conclusion where the Malkins learn Eddie's true identity. At that point, the conventions of the genre demand a scene where Eddie proves that he has really become the man he was only pretending to be. But it doesn't really happen—instead, Eddie wins Annie's heart back by reprising the old "actually getting hit by a car" con.
Then, like every comedy of its era, it fades to black over a tropical sounding pop song. (What was with that? Remember that "Some Like It Hot" song from Weekend at Bernie's? Or how about "Weather Man" from Groundhog Day? I love that song.)
They tried very hard to work Dana Carvey's mercurial "man of a thousand voices" schtick into this plot, including a preposterous sequence where he does his famous George H.W. Bush impression in a ballpark men's room. But for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, I find Dana Carvey extraordinarily likable in this role. He has a sort of emotional weightlessness about his performance that reminds me of the guy who played Psych.
This is a pretty forgettable movie, I guess, but I like it. It's miles away from being the worst movie Dana Carvey ever starred in. In the likely event that you've never heard of Opportunity Knocks, I say give it a try.
