Liar Liar

Tom Shadyac, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

This movie was made to answer a burning question: What if Jim Carrey starred in another movie? Would it make 300 million dollars?

The answer, of course, was yes.

Secondarily, the movie asked another question: What would life be like if you couldn't tell a lie? To answer that question, the movie introduces us to Jim Carrey as Fletcher Reede, a cynical and unethical lawyer who Doesn't Spend Enough Time with His Son. His ex-wife Audrey (Maura Tierney) is at her wits' end with Fletcher's flakiness and dishonesty, and she wants to move away to Boston with her fiancé Jerry (Cary Elwes) and take young Max (not portrayed by Alex D. Linz) along.

On Max's fifth birthday, after Fletcher breaks yet another promise to visit, Max makes a wish that for 24 hours Fletcher will be incapable of lying. Remarkably, the wish comes true, but fortunately Fletcher retains his ability to mug to the camera and say wacky catchphrases. But if Fletcher is forced to speak the truth, how will he go about his job of unscrupulously flouting sundry rules of professional responsibility?

After a series of increasingly zany setbacks, Fletcher discovers a convenient technicality that enables his client to win her case without lying. In the process, he discovers the true meaning of fatherhood, and resolves to stop Audrey and Max from moving to Boston. He exploits the laxity of pre-9/11 airport security to hijack a mobile stairway and drive it down a runway at the takeoff speed of a 737. (Those were the good old days, huh?) This extreme deviant behavior is exactly what was needed to convince Audrey that Fletcher can be a decent father, so she decides to stay in L.A.

This is a great example of a movie that starts with a clever premise and then actually makes it work. The strategy seems to have been to stick Jim Carrey into every situation where a normal person would feel compelled to lie: A one-night stand, a traffic stop, a meeting with your boss, a phone call from your mother, and of course, identifying the color of a pen. These scenes are funny, and the movie wisely avoids doing much else. I shudder to think what might have been if they had made the kid anything other than the plot device he is. Because the jokes work well, the moral character development scenes are easy to swallow. (And the line "I hold myself in contempt" is a very enjoyable play on words.)

Finally, also deserving of mention is the fact that this is one of many movies that has forced poor Cary Elwes to struggle with an American accent. Why couldn't Jerry have been English?

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Mrs. Doubtfire

Chris Columbus, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 71%

With the recent announcement of an upcoming Mrs. Doubtfire sequel, I figured it was time to consider the original. This hilarious romp is the tale of two dangerously unfit parents: A father whose delusions and obsessions drive him to spy on his ex-wife and children in disguise, and a mother so stupid she doesn't realize that the 6-foot-tall sexagenarian nanny in her midst looks and sounds exactly like Robin Williams.

Sally Field plays Miranda Hillard, a mother of three in San Francisco who is fed up with her lout of a husband, Daniel. As the movie begins, Daniel is fired from his job of pointlessly re-dubbing all the dialogue in 1940s-era cartoons. Soon enough, his marriage falls apart too, because Miranda is tired of his unreliability and his habit of throwing goat-themed parties for the kids. Daniel fares poorly in the divorce after the family court correctly perceives his spectacular incompetence as a father (and as a functioning adult in society). Miranda ends up with full custody of the children, unless and until Daniel can get his act together and land a new job.

So Daniel does what anybody would do in his situation—he disguises himself as an elderly Englishwoman named Mrs. Doutfire and takes a job as Miranda's housekeeper. (The sequence where Daniel's brother, Harvey Fierstein, helps him create his cross-dressing persona was totally lost on me as an 8-year-old, but I have grown to appreciate it.) It would be unfair to characterize this disguise as transparent, but Miranda and her kids must be close to Lois Lane levels of obliviousness not to recognize the man they've lived with for years underneath the wig and make-up.

Somehow Daniel manages to find enough time away from his day job to work as a gofer at a local TV station. He performs a manic, paleontologically inaccurate stand-up routine about dinosaurs, which the station owner happens to overhear. Confusing "children" with "your parents in the 70s," Mr. Lundy decides Daniel would be perfect to host a children's TV show, so he arranges a dinner meeting. Meanwhile, Miranda has developed a relationship with James Bond, much to Daniel's chagrin, and they have invited Mrs. Doubtfire to a family dinner at exactly the same restaurant at exactly the same time.

This leads to a Fred Flintstone escapade where Daniel has to repeatedly change back and forth from his hundreds of pounds of Mrs. Doubtfire make-up into the tasteful red real estate agent's blazer he's wearing to impress his boss. He suffers two wardrobe malfunctions: First, he goes to Mr. Lundy's table dressed as Mrs. Doubtfire, and when questioned, he explains that this is the character he will be playing on the children's show. Second, he has to use the Heimlich maneuver to rescue Pierce Brosnan from choking, and in the process loses his mask and wig.

Now that the awful truth is out, Miranda is furious at first. But eventually she realizes that her children are better off if they can spend time with their father now and then, so the two of them come to an arrangement. The movie ends with Mrs. Doubtfire appearing on a Mister Rogers style TV show, giving reassurance to a young letter-writer whose parents are divorced.

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This movie reminds me of two other movies about divorced parents, The Santa Clause and Liar, Liar. All three are great, and all of them had a lot of material that went over my head the first time around. Of the three, the only one where the parents get back together in the end is Liar, Liar. I think that's a cop-out ending, but on the other hand that movie was less sappy than Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm not sure which is better. I guess that one's next.

Ghost Rider

Mark Steven Johnson, 2007
Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

This Marvel superhero movie was released in February 2007, which was the first sign that it would not be a smash-hit. Superhero movies are the epitome of the summer blockbuster, so releasing one in late winter would seem to indicate a lack of faith in its blockbusting capabilities. And sure enough, Ghost Rider did not measure up to the Spider-Man and X-Men movies that went before it.

But you know, this movie is not awful. It's okay. And that's not such a small accomplishment in my book.

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The story revolves around Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist in the tradition of Evel Knievel and Homer Simpson, who sells his soul to the devil to save his sick father's life. The devil (called Mephistopheles and played by Peter Fonda) cures Johnny's father, but then causes him to die in an accident the next day. Johnny is angry, but Mephistopheles insists that he has upheld his end of the agreement, and that he will one day come a-calling on Johnny's soul.

(Why does the devil always do things like this? He's not going to get any decent word-of-mouth at this rate.)

Years later, we meet Johnny as an adult. I'm assuming there was a deleted scene where the devil removes Johnny's face and replaces it with Nicolas Cage, like in Face/Off; otherwise I'm at a loss to explain why he looks absolutely nothing like he did in the prologue.

His best bud, Donal Logue (who I always find really likable, but I can't put my finger on why), is at his wits' end with Johnny's outlandishly dangerous stunts. Johnny knows that Mephistopheles' unholy power prevents him from dying before he fulfills his end of their bargain, so he recklessly undertakes bike stunts that would make Super Dave Osborne blush. At one such extravaganza, he finds himself face-to-face with his high school sweetheart Roxanne (Eva Mendes).

Unfortunately, their efforts to rekindle their romance are stymied by the arrival of Mephistopheles' evil son Blackheart upon the earth. Blackheart is a being so dangerous that even the devil himself wants him stopped. Apparently, Blackheart wants to collect on a hundred-year-old contract that will give him the power of a thousand damned souls. It's pretty serious.

Mephistopheles commands Johnny to do battle against Blackheart by becoming the Ghost Rider, a fire skeleton monster that rides a magic motorcycle. The Ghost Rider has the power to turn people's eyes into brimstone or something, although I'm not sure why he wants to. He also has a fiery chain that he uses to kill Blackheart's evil angel friends.

When Blackheart murders Donal and kidnaps Roxanne, Ghost Rider seeks help from Sam Elliott, playing exactly the same role as in The Big Lebowski. Sam Elliott disappears after completing his four minutes of screen time, and Johnny rather unspectacularly kills Blackheart and saves the day. Having discharged his contractual duties, Johnny chooses to remain the Ghost Rider to fight for right.

Like I said before, this movie is all right. It isn't good, but it's easy to sit through, and what more can you really ask for?

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All right, look.

There is a sequel to this movie. It's called Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 18%. Please, please, please do not see this movie. It is awful. It is absolutely dreadful. I detest this movie.

It was directed by an entity known as "Neveldine/Taylor" and Nic Cage returns to the role. No other cast members return. As a matter of fact, calling it a "sequel" is misleading, since it in no way follows the plot of the first movie. What plot there is is incomprehensible. The characters' actions bear no correspondence to human behavior, and the dialogue consists of a series of random, meaningless sentences in the English language. If the movie had been in Hungarian, I don't think I would have noticed the difference. There are scenes where Nicolas Cage just stares at the camera and makes funny faces while riding his motorcycle, with no context or explanation.

This is an unspeakable monstrosity of a movie.

A character that seems to be the villain is played by Ciaran Hinds. The prevailing hypothesis is that this is Mephistopheles from the first movie, but he is inexplicably referred to as "Roarke." Although Johnny Blaze had embraced his Ghost Rider persona in the previous movie, he is now desperate to be rid of it. Equally unexplained is the fact that Johnny now becomes the Ghost Rider when he is angry. The only conceivable way to account for this is that the writers confused Ghost Rider with the Incredible Hulk, and no one ever realized the mistake. (Indeed, it would astonish me if the screenplay was ever read by anyone before production began.)

I hate this movie.

Here, just watch this scene. This may make you laugh. It makes me weep. That's because I have seen the movie, and I can report that everything else in it is even worse.

I realize that my over-the-top condemnation of Spirit of Vengeance may make some foolish reader decide to see it, on the theory of "How bad could it really be?" and/or "If it's this awful, I've got to see it." I assure you, you will regret it. (Remember who's saying this, now—how terrible does a movie have to be before I hate it?)

I refuse to include a graphic labeling this movie as over- or underrated. It is beneath contempt. Let us never speak of it again.

Angels in the Endzone

Gary Nadeau, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 28%

This is a made-for-TV sequel to Angels in the Outfield, and I think the simplest way to summarize this movie's plot is to point out the ways it differs from its forerunner:

1. Angels in the Outfield was about a baseball team called the Angels. Angels in the Endzone is about a football team called the Angels.

2. Angels in the Outfield was about professional athletes. This is about high school athletes.

3. Angels in the Outfield revolved around a kid who had been abandoned by his father. Angels in the Endzone is about two kids whose father is dead.

4. Angels in the Outfield was good.

Beyond that, you can just import all of your knowledge of the plot of the previous movie into the entry for this one. But if you'd like a little bit more information, read on.

Jesse (Matthew Lawrence) and Kevin (the kid from Richie Rich's Christmas Wish) are two brothers who have a perfect relationship with their father. He loves them, he teaches them to play football, and in general he spends copious amounts of Time with His Children. In fact, their relationship is so perfect, that the only conceivable conclusion is that this character is going to die in the first act.

And so he does, sending Jesse into a deep depression. He quits the (jaw-droppingly incompetent) high school football team before their first game, he becomes distant from his family, and he ditches class to hang out with the bad kids. These lowlifes make their living betting against the home team, taking advantage of the school-spirited freshmen who are naive enough to think the Angels have a prayer of winning.

About three quarters of the way through the movie, they graduate from book-making to robbing a gas station. They've dragged Jesse along for the ride, and for a few minutes we're led to believe he's been implicated in the crime, but no—his mom and the police immediately accept his (true) version of events, and nothing comes of it. I mention this not because it's interesting, but because it's a good example of the amount of thought that seems to have gone into the story.

As for the other brother, Kevin, his role is limited entirely to replicating Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character from the first movie. Jesse tells the boy that their family will never be okay until the day the Westfield Angels win the state championship. This, of course, parallels a similar line delivered by the deadbeat dad in Outfield. In that movie, young JoGo misunderstood his dad's sarcasm and prayed for the Angels to win the Pennant, but here, it's not really clear what Kevin thinks. I don't think he really believes that his family's well-being is connected to the football championship, but he prays for the team to win. It's almost as if he's aware that what he's doing is required by the plot.

Just like in the first movie, the real angels take to the field to perform obviously impossible feats, but no one in the stands is the wiser. (At one point, the football flies literally the entire length of the field under its own power, and no one seems to question how this is possible.) Somehow the divine manipulation of sporting events seems even more inappropriate when it's a bunch of teenagers the angels are cheating against. Then there is the obligatory subplot about how the adults think Kevin is hallucinating (including an appalling scene where a school counselor puts the moves on Kevin's widowed mother).

All the while, Jesse refuses to rejoin his team, because football brings up painful memories of his father. Finally, the coach has a heart-to-heart with Jesse and reminds him that his father was proud of his talent and would want him to continue playing The Game of Football. So Jesse agrees to play the championship game, which he wins without the help of the angels.

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I guess this is all right for a made-for-TV movie. The guy who plays the coach gives a workmanlike performance, and the mom isn't bad. There is also an assistant coach who seems to be channeling Harold from the Red Green Show; I could have done without him. The main brothers are fine.

One other thing: For a movie about divine beings, Angels in the Outfield didn't really have much religious content. This one seems to have more of a Calvinist attitude. There's a scene where Jesse blames himself for his father's accident, and his mother—rather than just reminding Jesse that he wasn't responsible—insists that nothing could have prevented his death. It's a pretty jarringly fatalistic comment, and the movie just leaves it at that. Maybe the kid from Seventh Heaven had a subconscious effect on the writers.

Ernest Rides Again

John Cherry, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%

It was difficult to find a poster for this movie. Most of the images I found were too small to be usable, so I resorted to this strange confetti-themed option. This seems to have been the theatrical poster, and it mentions the short subject "Mr. Bill Goes to Washington," which was screened together with Ernest Rides Again and also appeared on the VHS.

The other images were all DVD covers, and most of them included a blurb from the Boston Globe declaring this "The best of the series." Now, I don't think I'm out of line if I consider myself an authority on Ernest, and I can't imagine anyone thinking this was the best Ernest movie. This was the first one produced without the backing of Disney, and it certainly shows. Even the poster is half-assed—just look at the stock close-up of Ernest they used. He never even wears that white thermal Henley shirt in the movie (or in any other movie, for that matter). And I don't recall any confetti being involved in the plot.

Speaking of the plot, we now find Ernest working as custodian at a Virginia college, where he amuses himself by pretending to be Indiana Jones and palling around with a history professor named Dr. Melon. Melon likes Ernest, but he is put off by Ernest's monumental childishness. Melon's colleagues think the good doctor is a crank, obsessed with a half-baked theory that the real Crown Jewels of England are hidden in a Revolutionary War cannon called Goliath.

Now get ready for this, because this is going to stun you: The theory is true, and the cannon is located near the college. And they find it. The rest of the movie is largely taken up by a series of chase sequences, as Ernest and Dr. Melon try to protect the cannon and the jewels from a sinister looter named Glencliff. This mostly involves the cannon rolling down the highway at high speed, but somehow making all the turns and staying safely on the road. Unbeknownst to our heroes, MI-6 has also taken an interest, and some secret agents join the chase.

Dr. Melon has surmised based on various historical sources that the Crown Jewels are in the barrel of the cannon, but Ernest eventually discovers them in a powder barrel beside the cannon. He places the crown on his head, whereupon Glencliff captures him. The crown is stuck so tightly to Ernest's head that Glencliff tries to remove it with a cranial saw; unfortunately, the saw fails to make a scratch on Ernest's skull. ("Good thing it hit the hard end," Ernest explains.)

The secret agents close in and save Ernest, but since the crown cannot be removed from his head, they declare that he must now serve as King of England. Ernest doesn't care for the idea ("I'd have to learn the language!"), and luckily the crown slips off during a "what's that on your shirt" prank.

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As I indicated above, this is far from the best in the series. In fact, it was the last to be released theatrically; beginning with Ernest Goes to School, the rest would be released direct to VHS, which, frankly, was for the best. I remember renting these things from Blockbuster on weekends in elementary school and watching them repeatedly. Clearly, that's what they were made for, and there was no sense releasing them to an unappreciative public full of fuddy-duddy adults.

This was also Linda Kasch's first of three appearances in an Ernest movie, this time as Dr. Melon's overbearing wife Nan. She is accompanied in most of her scenes by two ineffectual door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen who have the irritating habit of finishing each other's sentences. These roles cry out to be played by Gailard Sartain and Bill Byrge from the Disney installments, but alas, that comedy duo would never return.

But there's one other thing this movie has, and that's the best song in the world, the Ballad of Ernest P. Worrell: listen for yourself.

Bushwhacked

Greg Beeman, 1995
Rotten Tomatoes score: 11%

The Wikipedia article for Bushwhacked explains that it has an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but we're then reassured that the audience rating is 37%. So don't be misled by the abysmally low score; slightly more than one-third of audience members enjoyed it.

Basically, this is yet another exemplar of that venerable 1990s genre, the "crook gets mistaken for a kids' role model, then has to become a genuine role model in spite of himself" film. In that genre, I think this one ranks somewhere between Mr. Headmistress with Harland Williams and the excellent Principal Takes a Holiday with Kevin Nealon.

The crook this time around is Daniel Stern, and within the first 15 minutes he finds himself impersonating a "Ranger Scout" leader on an overnight camping trip in the mountains of northern California. The only problem is that Stern's character, Max Grabelski, isn't actually a crook. He's a slacker and a slob, but he is in fact innocent of the crime he's being pursued for. That's a big misstep—this kind of story works better when the protagonist is a non-threatening but genuinely culpable person; that way there's room for him to become a mensch. Since Max was never a scoundrel to begin with, his reformation doesn't have any real significance.

Instead, Max is merely suspected of murder. The few scenes that get us to this point are a totally confusing jumble. Max works for "Freedom Express," a courier service, and he has been involved in some vaguely sketchy business involving deliveries (with a fat tip for Max) to various locations at exactly 10 p.m. On one such delivery, he finds a house on fire, and the FBI shows up just in time to think Max is the arsonist. Then they discover an unrecognizable dead body with the teeth of millionaire Reinhart Bragden.

Instead of making any effort to resolve the situation, Max becomes a fugitive from justice. Here he crosses paths with a Ragtag Band of Kids who are embarking on their first overnight scouting event. They're expecting to be led by veteran scoutmaster Jack Erickson (R. Lee Erm—oh, no, sorry. This isn't R. Lee Ermey; it's Brad Sullivan). Max steals pseudo-R.Lee's hummer to elude the police, and before we know it he's been mistaken for the real deal.

The rest of the movie is mostly a lot of wacky wilderness adventures in the vein of The Great Outdoors. Max encounters a grizzly bear and faints, impressing the kids with his ability to "play dead." While collecting pine cones to build a fire, Max picks up a beehive. (He suffers no visible stings, but the dialogue inexplicably suggests that the scouts rescued him from anaphylaxis.) Max teaches the boys how to relieve themselves over the edge of a cliff. All the while, the kids are unaware that an FBI agent and the real scoutmaster Erickson are in pursuit.

When they finally do catch up, it turns out that the FBI guy has been in on the frame-up all along. He's been hired by Reinhart Bragden, who faked his own death for some reason, and now they're trying to kill Max. So now, for the final act of the movie, the kids decide to rally behind Max to stop the bad guys. This involves a huge number of death-defying cliffhanging stunts, which were actually pretty exciting to watch, with the exception of a gag where Max stretches himself across a crevice to act as a human bridge. This scene is so cartoony that it makes the other stunts seem less daring, since cartoons are never in real danger.

What's left to talk about? Obviously Max comes through in the end, and he wins the respect of the kids and the real scoutmaster.

This is a movie I missed as a kid. Now that I've seen it, I don't see why people didn't like it. I already mentioned the biggest problem, which is that Daniel Stern was too decent to begin with, so he didn't have a chance to go from bad to good. Other than that, I think its big problem was the PG-13 rating. They fixed that problem by removing the movie's one F-bomb for the DVD release, so now 28-year-old kids like me can enjoy it.

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.