BLIND DATE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Slapdash comedy really shows up the
deterioration of Blake Edwards's style. Two funny scenes and
for the rest Edwards just seems to tread water.
Blake Edwards has been making comedies for a long time. He may be best known for the Inspector Clouseau films that starred Peter Sellers. Edwards has turned out a comedy every year or so since the mid Fifties, and since the early Seventies he has made little but comedies. Many of his comedies have been uproariously funny like THE PARTY, but in my opinion he is having some trouble keeping up the level of his humor and his comedies work nowhere nearly as well as they once did. Edwards seems to be running out of ideas and his films seem to have less and less care lavished on each.
BLIND DATE has the feel of an hour-long script padded, mostly at the end, to be a full-length film. Like INTO THE NIGHT and AFTER HOURS, BLIND DATE is the story of how much can go wrong with someone's life in the course of a single night. After the story of that night, BLIND DATE finds itself with no story to tell and no place to go. The rest is just sort of tacked on.
Walter Davis (played by Bruce Willis) is a financial executive who needs to find a date to take to a business dinner. Against his better judgement, he allows his brother to fix him up with a woman he has never met. To his surprise she doesn't look like the underside of a rock. In fact, Nadia (played by Kim Basinger) is a knock-out. Then he makes his big mistake. Against the advice of his brother and Nadia's own reluctance, he gives her a drink of champagne. From that point on, Pandora's Box has been opened and Walter's life would never be the same again.
There are perhaps two scenes that actually work in this film; the rest of the film just frames those scenes, and not particularly imaginatively. Through much of the film people act in totally unexplainable ways on the weak script excuse that they are drunk, so not themselves. Often the script doesn't even make that much sense. One character spends a good part of the film driving though store fronts. The police never stop him and his car sustains only minor damages.
These days some very good comedies are coming out, with the current TIN MEN, RAISING ARIZONA, and perhaps OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE as prime examples. If Edwards is going to trade off of his name and do as slipshod a job as this, he will soon have to hang it up. For the sake of a couple of scenes that do work, rate this one a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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