MY FAVORITE MARTIAN (Disney) Starring: Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Daniels, Elizabeth Hurley, Daryl Hannah, Wallace Shawn, Christine Ebersole, Michael Lerner, Ray Walston. Screenplay: Sherri Stoner & Deanna Oliver. Producers: Robert Shapiro & Jerry Leider and Mark Toberoff. Director: Donald Petrie. MPAA Rating: PG (profanity, adult humor) Running Time: 93 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Suggestive references to "balls" and "nuts." To breasts. To giving "the finger." To getting into someone's pants. To catching one's genitalia in one's zipper. To contraception. To virginity. Two references to urination. A flatulence gag. A couple of belches. And a toilet's-eye-view of a fat guy's rear end as he bemoans eating that last burrito.
Welcome, friends, to the Wonderful World of Disney.
In MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, we discover that there is intelligent life in our solar system, and that absolutely none of it was involved in making this film. Continuing its impressive string of stupid and vulgar live action films, Disney this time recycles the 1960s television series which starred Bill Bixby and Ray Walston. Jeff Daniels stars here as Tim O'Hara, a somewhat socially inept television news producer; Christopher Lloyd is a Martian who crash-lands and poses as Tim's Uncle Martin while trying to repair his ship. Along the way there are plenty of crazy misunderstandings and near-discoveries, including the suspicion by Tim's faithful camerawoman Lizzie (Daryl Hannah) that he has the hots for her, and the attempt by ambitious reporter Brace Channing (Elizabeth Hurley) to break the story of a close encounter.
Not surprisingly, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN essentially consists of a series of scenes which present the opportunity to show off special effects. Martin is able to appear in human form through the use of a special gum, which also has unique effects on humans. He has a sentient, wise-cracking spacesuit called Zoot (uncredited voice by "Seinfeld's" Wayne Knight) which does kooky things like pitching woo to a dress. He uses a "molecular condenser" to shrink objects like his space ship and Tim's Plymouth (don't even bother with scientific curiosities like why a "molecular condenser" also changes the weight of the object). When Martin gets upset, his body parts fall off. And viewers who enjoy that sort of thing -- and don't have trouble with the ridiculous notion of Daryl Hannah as a wallflower -- will giggle blithely along.
Trouble is, most of those will be kids. Yes, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN sports a PG rating, which clearly states that "some material may not be suitable for children," but let's get serious here. Disney has turned the company name into a license to print money for "family entertainment," which used to mean something a parent wouldn't be embarrassed to take a kid to see. Take a look at that list in the first paragraph above and you decide. This is filmmaking not for children, but for idiots of all ages, pandering with a sense of impunity because they haven't exactly gone broke in the last couple of years by doing so. In a late scene, when Tim is admonished that humans should do something "about the oceans...and afternoon talk shows," the hypocrisy of this film holding _anything_ up to ridicule for its stupidity or offensiveness nearly burst a large vein in my forehead. How sad to see appealing comic performers like Lloyd (regurgitating bits from BACK TO THE FUTURE) and Wallace Shawn (as nasty government scientist Dr. Elliot Coleye...e. coli, get it?) floundering in a mess like this. How much sadder still that people will pay to see it.
There are maybe two harmless visual gags that work in MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, and perhaps that many examples of real wit in the script. I liked the fact that Martin's molecular condenser makes a sound remarkably similar to R2-D2 when he's shot by the Jawas in STAR WARS; the absurd parallel to E.T.'s revival also made me chuckle. Mostly I sat in stony, angry silence as this aggressively brainless film dribbled towards a sequel-ready conclusion, tallying up the ways it treated viewers like pre-schoolers who laugh hysterically when they shout "doody-head" at each other. Remember that list next time you trust Disney's name to mean anything but mass-market infantilism.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Martian chronic ills: 1.
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