Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%
In 1987, John Hughes made one of the best movies in the world. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not just a solid comedic film, though it is that. It's one of those few movies that really stays with you and makes you feel good about life.
Steve Martin and John Candy portray two flawed, believable, relatable strangers stuck together on a Thanksgiving weekend trip that goes wrong in every way a screenwriter can think of. Of course, there's nothing brilliant in that concept; it's been done a million times. It's the execution that made the movie such a classic, from Del Griffith's pantomime of the "Mess Around", to the at first funny but then increasingly heartbreaking confrontation in the motel room ("You want to hurt me?"), to Edie McClurg's two-word response to Steve Martin's over-the-top outburst (the scene that singlehandedly got the movie its R rating), to the weird but hauntingly evocative synthesizer score, to the very last shot of the movie, where John Candy says more with a facial expression that most movies manage to say in 120 minutes of dialogue. The film accomplishes such brilliance with such a humdrum concept that one can't resist the temptation to compare it to "a lesser film". A lesser film would have made this story stupid, or sappy, or irritating, or all three.
"And just to prove it," said John Hughes in 1991, "by God, I'll make that lesser film!"
To be fair, John Hughes only wrote Dutch. Other people directed and produced it. But I can't let him off the hook that easily. Hughes had a massive influence on the pop culture of the 1980s and 90s, and his movies were scattered broadly across the comedy spectrum, both in terms of content and of quality. (Consider that The Breakfast Club and Flubber were written by the same man.) And I know it's not fair to put him up on a pedestal just because he made one of my favorite movies. But the similarity of this film to Planes, Trains is so blatant that it cries out to be judged by its predecessor's standard.
The effect is like watching Jaws 2 after you've seen Jaws. It's not bad exactly, and if the first Jaws had never existed, Jaws 2 would have been just another OK summer movie. But, because it was a sequel, it became an exercise in recreating every commercially successful aspect of the first film, only without the coherence and plot integrity that made the original work so well. It's a mediocre movie doing an impression of a really good movie.
So is Dutch.
Dutch Dooley (Ed O'Neill) is a working-class Joe whose girlfriend Natalie was the loser in a painful divorce from her rich snob husband Reed (perennial bad guy Christopher McDonald). Reed is a jerk. He has no other personality traits, except that he is a rich jerk. His richness is important because it distinguishes him from Dutch, who is also a jerk, and because it gives us an ostensible reason to consider Dutch an underdog and therefore worthy of our sympathy.
Natalie learns that Reed, who was supposed to spend Thanksgiving with their preteen son Doyle, has stood the boy up for a business trip. Doyle, whose spoiled mind has been poisoned by Reed, would rather spend Thanksgiving alone in his dorm room at boarding school than with his mother, but Dutch offers to prove his worthiness as a mate by bringing the little bastard home to Chicago for the weekend.
Dutch and Doyle's relationship strikes the worst possible note right off the bat. Doyle knows who Dutch is and why he has come, but he pretends to think he's an intruder and tries to beat him up using his karate skills. The scene is played too seriously to be slapstick, and it makes the kid seem deeply disturbed. Dutch then responds by hog-tying the boy to a hockey stick and carrying him bodily out to the car.
In the right kind of movie, this could have been funny. When Bad Santa beat the crap out of some teenage bullies, it worked, because you knew that was the kind of movie where it's OK to laugh at Billy Bob Thornton beating up children. This movie really wants you to care about its characters, though, so there isn't anything funny about it. It makes Dutch seem like an unlikable roughneck who shouldn't be allowed to supervise children. The movie tries to win you over to Dutch's side by making Doyle utterly hateful, but all that did was make me dislike both of them.
Every once in a while, you can see some potential in the characters. At one point, Doyle steals and deliberately wrecks Dutch's car and, and in the following minute or so, he acts exactly like a kid who suddenly realizes he's crossed the line. But that goes nowhere, and before long they're off on a mindless plot twist where Dutch's wallet gets stolen by two lovable call girls who offer to give them a ride—one of whom looks unsettlingly like a teenager, possibly just because they wanted Doyle to have a crush on her, but anyway it's creepy.
There are a lot more events in the plot, but none worth describing. It's just an obligatory series of mishaps until they finally get to Chicago. When they do, Dutch confronts and then punches Reed, which again makes Dutch a jerk and shows that he has not grown as a character in any way.
I should note in closing that Reed is played by Christopher McDonald, who plays pretty much the same character in every movie he's in, and who also ended up on the receiving end of a gratuitously violent comeuppance in Happy Gilmore and to a lesser extent Flubber.
So, in conclusion, when you're searching for a 30-year-old Thanksgiving film to watch this holiday weekend, don't pick Dutch. And, since I can't think of any other Thanksgiving movies from 1991, you may just be out of luck. See what old Garfield and Doc Boy are up to, I guess. That's got to be on YouTube.
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