AMOS AND ANDREW
A film review by David Pimmel
Copyright 1993 David Pimmel
Starring Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson, Dabney Coleman Rated PG-13 for language, adult humor
Synopsis ========
Andrew Sterling (Samuel L. Jackson) is mistaken for a burglar in his own home and is shot at by the police. Upon discovery of the truth, Sheriff Tolliver (Dabney Coleman) brings in Amos O'Dell (Nicholas Cage) for spin control, putting him up as an armed assailant who really did the shooting. Of course, all good plans go astray.
Review ======
This film seems to suffer from confusion about what it is trying to accomplish. It drifts between slap stick, dark comedy and social satire. The end result is that it doesn't seem to get anywhere. There are some real funny bits and also some real interesting serious parts, but in the end I was left wondering what was the point.
Nicholas Cage is one of my favorite performers because he seems to always pick likable losers to play. Here he steps into the same role again and brings very little new to it. He seems to be going through the motions more than giving it his all. Jackson is much the same way. Coleman provides some of the best parts of the film while simultaneously providing some of the most unoriginal and uninspired work of the film. Don't get me wrong there are some very interesting parts to the film.
Now that I've said what is wrong I would like to mention some of what is right about the film. The parts dealing with social satire work very well. At its core this is a film about a supposedly liberal white community not wanting to integrate. The scenes involving the stuffed shirt local couple were my favorite in the film. Here the film is a success. The slap stick humor doesn't work nearly as well, being on one occasion, painfully uninteresting. But the social satire is dead on target.
In summary, while the film is very uneven, at certain points it hits very strong highs. Unfortunately the pendulum swings both ways and there is an equal number of things that don't work or are uninteresting.
Rating ======
No thumb up or down. ** 1/2 out of **** --
David Pimmel pimmel@cs.wisc.edu
.
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