WRONGFULLY ACCUSED Reviewed by Jamie Peck
"Wrongfully Accused" meshes together the premises of "The Fugitive" and "Patriot Games," casting its always game star as Ryan Harrison (get it?), a master violinist who is drawn into an affair with a married temptress (Kelly Le Brock). She, however, sets Harrison up to take the rap for the murder of her husband (Michael York) - a crime actually committed by a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed man (Aaron Pearl). Harrison is arrested, found guilty and sentenced to death, but escapes from a prison bus, of course, and then is pursued by a determined U.S. marshal named Fergus Falls (Richard Crenna, unnecessarily riffing off of Tommy Lee Jones' already smirky Oscar-winning role). There's also a mystery brunette (Melinda McGraw) and an assassination subplot involving the U.N. Secretary General, but like any of it matters.
"Wrongfully Accused" gets off to an assured start, with an in-concert Nielsen, touted "Lord of the Violin" by bare-chested posters, pulling a Jimi Hendrix on his musical instrument as hundreds of tuxedo-clad mosh in front of the stage. Nice touch. Most of the scenes that follow, however, never top the opener. (Hysterical exceptions: the Mentos and "Baywatch" goofs.) Movie parodies are crammed in at an almost-subliminal rate, but most are empty. When a giant snake lunges onto the screen and snatches a cast member a la "Anaconda" or baseball players disappear into a "Field of Dreams"-esque cornfield, there's really nothing to laugh at. Other moments, like an interlude in a fishing shop, are so unfocused that you're not sure what you're supposed to be laughing at.
There seem to be more cheap references than frenzied send-ups here, so it's possible that director/writer Pat Proft, by bombarding the viewer with a careless mixture of the two, guarantees something is sure to stick. And what does stick sticks well, particularly the jabs at genre conventions like stylized flashbacks and hard-boiled dialogue, what those "Naked Gun"s (which Proft collaborated on) did great; these bits are so on-target that they allow you to remember "Wrongfully Accused" as an almost-halfway-there spoof instead of a lame-brained failure. The movie might have been cursed to begin with, opening fast on the heels of "Mafia!", from Proft colleague Jim Abrahams, and "BASEketball," from Proft colleague David Zucker, but it's a strong possibility that nobody is going to be accusing "Wrongfully Accused" of being Nielsen's funniest.
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