MY GIANT (Castle Rock/Columbia) Starring: Billy Crystal, Gheorghe Muresan, Kathleen Quinlan, Steven Seagal. Screenplay: David Seltzer. Producer: Billy Crystal. Director: Michael Lehmann. MPAA Rating: PG (mild profanity, mild violence, adult themes) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I can't remember a film getting as much mileage out of a single visual gag as MY GIANT gets out of its one and only visual gag. The gag, of course, is the premise: diminutive Billy Crystal teamed in a buddy-bonding comedy with 7'7" professional basketball player Gheorghe Muresan. Crystal plays Sammy Kamin, a low-rent talent agent whose best clients tend to work car shows or wedding receptions; Muresan plays Max, a gentle, Shakespeare-quoting Romanian giant who saves Sammy's life when his car plunges into a river. Sammy immediately sees dollar signs in the massive Max, persuading him to try movie acting with a promise to visit Max's long-lost love Lillianna in America. Soon the unlikely pair are on the road together, every scene between them something that momentarily fools you into thinking there _must_ be some special effects at work.
It's enough to make you wonder why they don't make silent films anymore, when this one could have been thoroughly enjoyable without a single character opening his or her mouth. Crystal, for his part has always been good with a reaction take and a vaudevillian's sense for milking a laugh visually. Unfortunately, he has become obsessed with plots in which he invariably plays workaholics who learn What Really Matters -- two CITY SLICKERS movies, FORGET PARIS, MR. SATURDAY NIGHT and now MY GIANT. David Seltzer's script piles on the pathos so thick -- tender moments between Sammy and his estranged wife (Kathleen Quinlan), sad-eyed tete-a-tetes with his son (Zane Carney), Lillianna's rejection of Max, a potentially life-threatening ailment for one main character -- that it threatens to crush everything in its path. The few decent jokes Crystal manages to squeeze in between the heart-felt glances hardly seem worth the effort.
Muresan, meanwhile, is just too endearingly goofy not to look at, a Great Dane puppy in a peasant shirt. If you've seen his hilarious Snickers commercial, in which he hawks an eponymous cabbage-cented cologne on a home shopping channel, you know Muresan has charm and a surprising comic sense. You would also know that, compared to Muresan's marble-mouthed diction, Andre the Giant sounded like he studied with Henry Higgins. It's an undemanding role, one in which Muresan demonstrates infinitely more screen presence than fellow hoopster-cum-thespians like Shaquille O'Neal and Michael Jordan. You just can't help wishing that the big guy would continue to smile engagingly while embarking on fewer adventures into the English language.
Whatever its failings, MY GIANT is almost worth watching simply for a few jaw-droppings cenes featuring Steven Seagal. Playing himself on the set of an action movie where Max might play the villain, Seagal shows more willingness to poke fun at his image than I ever suspected he had in him. When his director asks if a scene could be better with one more take, a casually arrogant Seagal answers, "No;" when he makes a call to Sammy's son as a favor, he allows the skeptical boy to mock his look ("that stupid ponytail"), his acting ("lessons...how about taking a few?") and his muttered line-readings ("are you going to go hang out with Stallone so I can understand you _less_?") For five minutes, MY GIANT is comic genius, and Seagal deflates himself masterfully.
And then, it's back to swimming through they syrup of Marc Shaiman's score to get to the warm-n-fuzzy denouement. MY GIANT has its moments, but its generally such a tepid and non-threatening comedy that the moments can't add up to much. Feel-good shmaltz like this works much better when you don't have to listen to the shmaltz being spelled out for you. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to imagine a version of MY GIANT made 70 years ago, where no precious speeches got in the way of chuckling at mis-matched protagonists.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fee-fi-fo-fumbles: 5.
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