WRONGFULLY ACCUSED (1998)
Rating: 2.0 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Pat Proft
Written by: Pat Proft
Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Richard Crenna, Kelly LeBrock, Melinda McGraw
Ingredients: Parody about fugitive searching for the real killer
Synopsis: In this farcical spoof of THE FUGITIVE a concert violinist named Ryan Harrison (Leslie Nielsen) is seduced by someone else's wife (Kelly Le Brock), and invited for a late night rendezvous. Reaching the mansion, Harrison gets attacked by a mysterious one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed terrorist, and framed for the husband's murder. Thanks to a lucky accident, Harrison escapes from the prison bus, becomes a fugitive, and attempts to find out who framed him. Meanwhile a crack team of lawmen led by Fergus Falls (Richard Crenna) is hot on the trail.
WRONGFULLY ACCUSED is not an action movie, but a Leslie Nielsen comedy similar to the NAKED GUN series. The main idea is to poke fun at movies such as ANACONDA, TITANIC, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, BRAVEHEART and THE FUGITIVE through the use of unlikely comedic situations and rambling dialogue containing movie theme cliches and catchphrases.
Opinion: The main character's name (Ryan Harrison) is obviously an amalgam of Harrison Ford and Jack Ryan (Ford played the Jack Ryan character in the movies PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER), so most of the parody revolves around Harrison Ford movies. In fact, there's even a sendup of the scene where space hero Han Solo gets encased in a block of carbonite.
The comedy, however, is hit or miss. The farce is good (typically he escapes one danger only to get bonked on the head by another), but the parts of dialogue where Harrison goes on rambling discourses concerning the Beatles and other topics are more boring than funny. On a scale of one to ten on the comedy scale, I'd give it a six.
Reviewed August 21, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
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