HONEYMOON IN VEGAS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
HONEYMOON IN VEGAS is a film directed and written by Andrew Bergman. It stars James Caan, Nicolas Cage, Sarah Jessica Parker, with Pat Morita and Ann Bancroft. Rated PG-13, for sexual situations.
HONEYMOON IN VEGAS is a romantic comedy with an excellent cast and a first-rate director-writer. Andrew Bergman was once called by New York magazine "The Unknown King of Comedy" for writing some very funny comedies, such as BLAZING SADDLES, THE IN-LAWS, and SOAP DISH, inter alia. In 1981 he stubbed his toe directing SO FINE, but in 1990 he did the wonderful THE FRESHMAN, a much neglected and underappreciated gem that starred Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando (in one of the boldest and bravest self-parodies I have ever seen).
Then we've got the considerable talents of the cast. James Caan, looking slim and healthy, an actor who broke my heart by being brilliant in THE GAMBLER and then pissing away his career for years, is perfect as the charming, vicious gambler. Nicolas Cage, mercifully minus his most mannered affections, is the straight man and plays it without a single wink at the camera. Sarah Jessica Parker, who impressed a lot of people in last year's L.A. STORY as the spacy, hyper-kinetic beach girl, SanDeE, is a lot smarter here, but still the slightly dense, slightly innocent love interest of Caan and Cage.
The situation -- a boobish everyman caught up in the wiles of a gangster and an increasingly absurd solution -- is familiar Bergman territory. As if the basic situation were not absurd enough, Bergman goes over the line with a running joke about Elvis impersonators that culminates in a scene so full of plot holes and so unlikely as to qualify as a contemporary version of the deus ex machina who has solved so many dramatic and comedic situations throughout the history of theater. There is also a problem with way Bergman handles his villain, Caan's Tommy the gambler. He sets him up as a sympathetic, if unprincipled, character, not unlike Brando's Godfather parody, and then in the last ten minutes turns Tommy into the blackest and most vile of men, destroying the dynamic and ambiguity that had made the rest of film complex and interesting.
I recommend HONEYMOON IN VEGAS for its virtues and for its interesting flaws, but you should go to a discount matinee to see them and it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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