LEONARD PART 6
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Bill Cosby knows how to do amusing spy
stuff. He did it often enough on I SPY. But this film is
the kind of stuff he thinks you want to see. This film is
aimed at a seven-year-old mentality and serves as a textbook
on how to be insulting to your audience in product
placements. Rating: -1.
Back in the mid-to-late 1960s, NBC-TV had the highest-rated television show. The show was I SPY starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. These were still the early days of color television for many people and I SPY had enjoyable plots and was filmed in interesting locations like Hong Kong or Mexico. The stories were good (at least for American commercial television), and the locations were great, and Cosby was terrific as Alexander Scott, the Rhodes scholar turned wise-cracking secret agent. He was the number two man to Culp's Kelly Robinson. Well, in those days you were more interested in the second man anyway. The first guy was dull as white bread. Think of THE MAN FROM UNCLE, STAR TREK, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin. The top banana is there to give the audience someone to identify with and the second guy is the one with the real personality.
Cosby was great as an irreverent spy. He was what you would get if you took the "Beverly Hills Cop" and injected him with 60 more IQ points and about a gallon of class. The idea of an Alexander-Scott-like character as Cosby knows how to play him in a spy adventure is a pretty good idea. Well, Cosby has returned to the spy business in a film called LEONARD PART 6. Neither the title nor the poster really encourages me that this is the film I could have hoped for. The credits do list Tom Courtenay (who played the title character in LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER and the powerful Strelnikov in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO). The film also stars Joe Don Baker and Moses Green, who has real dramatic abilities. So what kind of a film has Cosby-- who also starred and provided the story--put together? He has put together a film that shows exactly what he thinks will sell. He has put together a film aimed at a seven-year-old's mind He has wasted Gunn and spit on Courtenay. Anyone who has any respect for Cosby should be forced to watch this film to see what Cosby thinks of his audience.
Cosby plays a super-super-secret agent who has saved his country five times before in five stories that (mercifully) have never been told. He has now been retired for seven years doing little but be rich. The film is filled with lots of "rich lifestyle" jokes that were boring in ARTHUR and are worse in LEONARD. And in the rich jokes is where Courtenay gets used, as Leonard's butler! An evil force is controlling small animals like squirrels and frogs and getting them to kill people. The CIA asks for Leonard's help but he is too busy trying to win back his ex-wife. He is also having trouble with small animals, but with him it is the shrimp his ex-wife is throwing at his face. Hey, if you get the giggles seeing people pour food on Cosby, this is the film for you. Well, eventually Leonard gets his act together enough that he is ready to go after the baddies. That's when the film starts to go downhill.
And talk about product placements! There is a certain brand of flavored sugar-water that Cosby hawks when he isn't movie-making, so why should he stop when he is? But of course he does it realistically and artistically. In one action scene he opens a refrigerator in a fancy restaurant's kitchen and it is full of cans of the stuff--more than the restaurant would use in two years! In another scene, he is in his fantastically well-appointed exercise room in his mansion and there is a vending machine for the stuff. Why he'd put a vending machine in his own exercise room is never explained. But the best placement is where he is having a conversation with someone and is holding a bottle of the stuff (where he finds it in glass bottles anymore, I have no idea!) placed so it is the part of the scene nearest the camera. He is holding the bottle so that the name is centered for the viewer. And he is holding it at the bottom third of the bottle in a way nobody holds a bottle, but he has to hold it that way so his hand does not cover up the name! Oh, yes, another scene is backstage at a theater and there, piled up, are literally hundreds of bars of soap of an easily readable brand.. Just why an acting company needs several hundred bars of soap is unclear, particularly since this particular soap is recommended for hands only.
Being fair, this film does have a few funny gags. I am going to be generous and give it a low -1. After all, it is the holiday season and also Cosby has done good work a couple of decades back.
Mark R. Leeper
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mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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