Parent Trap
A review
by Jeremiah Rickert
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, Lindsay Lohan Directed by: Nancy Meyers
Disney's remake department must be working overtime, trying to ressurect their "wonderful" "hits" of the past. We've seen remakes of such "classics" as "The Shaggy Dog," "The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes" "The Absent Minded Professor," and now "The Parent Trap." Most of these have been rather horrid attempts at injecting the 90s into concepts that were borne of the 60s. However, "The Parent Trap" outclasses all of these others in several respects.
Our story, as in the original, concerns a set of identical twins living with single parents. Annie James and Hallie Parker are the twins (played convincingly by newcomer Lindsay Lohan) who meet at summer camp. They discover that their parents (Dennis Quaid and Tony award winner Natasha Richardson) separated soon after they were born, each taking one of the twins with them. The girls were then raised without knowledge of each other. However, they both end up attending the same Summer Camp one year and after at first becoming rivals at the camp, they then realize they are twins with the same parents. They concoct a plan to switch places with each other, so they can meet the parent they never knew, and then force their parents to meet again when they're unswitched. After switching and enjoying time with their "new" parent, it is discovered that their father plans to remarry to a 20-something gold-digger who is only after his money (played with slime by Elaine Hendrix). The race is on to get everyone in once place again and convince their father that it's their mother he should marry.
The parents are Nick Parker (Dennis Quaid) and Elizabeth James (played by Tony winner Natasha Richardson). Parker runs a winery, and is an outdoorsey type, while James is a London Wedding Dress designer, with a growing reputation. Each of them seems to have done well without the other.
There is some fantastic comic relief provided by each parents' hired help. Lisa Ann Walter (Eddie) plays Chessy, the crass, down-to-earth housekeepr for Nick, and Simon Kunz (Goldeneye, 4 Weddings and a Funeral) plays Martin, Elizabeth's bulter. Each of them cares for the girls almost as much as their parents and each gives a hand in straightening things out.
The film kept me interested throughout its entirety, something that a lot of recent big-budget films have failed to do. The jokes range from the very obvious to the very subtle. In other words, there's stuff for the young kids to laugh at, as well as the adults in the audience. The acting is all more than adequate, except for perhaps Quaid. Having seen the original, I always saw Nick Parker as a little rougher than Quaid's portrayal. The late Brian Keith, in the original version, was a man who had some money, but didn't know what to do with it, was befuddled when it came to things like dressing up and acting refined in front of a woman, Quaid was a little too adjusted to these things, which doesn't ruin the movie, but it takes away an element that could have made it better. They don't really explore the conflict between the two worlds that the new parents live in. Farm life is a far cry from a London design house.
Meyers direction does the job just fine, she also had a hand in the screenplay. I have to give her a bravo for the long fencing duel fought by the two twins. Besides being rather hilarious, it had a lot of homages to the classic duels of the past, with lots of posing, strutting, and general braggadacio.
Overall I was entertained by this "little" film. It's by far the best of the recent Disney remakes, and was more entertaining than most of the summer blockbusters.
Of the $6.75 that I paid for my ticket, it was worth every penny.
Copyright 1998 Jeremiah Rickert --
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews