My Favourite Martian
Starring Jeff Daniels, Christopher Lloyd, Elizabeth Hurley and Darryl Hannah Directed By Donald Petrie Running Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
(Walt Disney Pictures)
I love movies. I really do. Every time I watch great movies like Goodfellas (1990) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), a tear comes to my eye due to the awesome talent, skill and entertainment that is on display. Even lower grade films such as The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994) or Ghostbusters II (1988) while not exactly brilliantly well made, are certainly not a waste of celluloid and present entertainment value. Then there's My Favourite Martian, the exact opposite of what a movie should be: a hurried, poorly written and acted movie with one goal, to make money. Disney, ever since The Lion King (1994) have lost their magic touch, but this dross just shows how far Disney have sunk.
Christopher Lloyd plays a Martian who crash lands in front of T.V reporter's Tim O'Hara car (Daniels), and soon Tim finds the Martian in his home, trying to recover and fix his spaceship. Along with his 'Zoot' spacesuit, voiced by Wayne Knight, must fix his spaceship before it explodes, and also try to stop his identity being revealed to the public, firstly by O'Hara, but later by rival T.V presenter Brace Channing (Hurley), by calling himself Tim's 'Uncle Martin.' 'Laughter' is supposed to arise from the 'comical' events, but never does.
Many bad films have good intentions, but My Favourite Martian doesn't appear to try to provide any entertainment. Filled to the brim with wham bang special effects, My Favourite Martian offers little more than some nice eye candy. Christopher Lloyd mugs his way through the entire movie, I've never seen a man pull a face for 93 minutes until now. Jeff Daniels plays 'staple nice guy' and his role is useless. His performance is incredibly lazy, although his paperthin character doesn't deserve more than the performance he gives. Darryl Hannah looks as pretty as ever, but her role is somewhat, erm, limited. Hurley mistakes 'acting' for 'shouting and looking like a twit' and wins the David Wilcock award for 'Most Irritating, Godawful Performance in a Moving Picture.' Way to go Liz! For the supporting cast, Disney manage to assemble every character actor out there, during the film I was going 'he was the guy in...ah..er...' before finally giving up and switching off.
Another major setback is the staple 'comedy sidekick.' Unfortunately, the writers (Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, if anyone cares) forget that a comedy sidekick needs to be 'funny.' Instead, they deliver Zoot, the Martians deeply unfunny sidekick. Although meant to be a manic character no doubt, every line that comes out of his 'neck' is a dud. A real dud. Citizen Kane delivers more laughs a minute than his hell spawn piece of polyester. Even the kids in the audience were insulted by this character: not one child even bothered to smirk. It's a nice special effect, though.
Another problems with this comedy are the gags themselves. Or rather, the lack of them. My Favourite Martian reaches a new level of toilet humour: it goes past the bowl, down the pipe and into the sewer. Now, toilet humour can be funny, as Dumb and Dumber (1994) humorously showed. But here, characters farting, belching and almost getting crapped on (literally) is not 'amusing.' It's insulting. There's one good gag right before the credits, but it appears the guy who wrote that gag tragically died and his unfunny twin continued. Either that, or they were hoping that easy to please six year olds wouldn't mind the fact that his movie is beaten by Men At Work in the funny stakes. Yes, Men At Work. Yowza!
The fact that a lot of money was pumped into this film, and that they actually got people to agree to be in this film just depresses me even more. There are thousands of brilliant films out there that can't get distribution, yet trash like this gets released nation-wide with ease. Thankfully, as soon as it makes it's money, it will never be seen again, and My Favourite Martian will end up where the two lead characters do near the end of the movie: down the toilet.
RATING=* OUT OF *****
A David Wilcock Review ©1999
DAVID WILCOCK david.wilcock@btinternet.com Visit the Wilcock Movie Page for U.K film reviews! http://www.wilcock54.freeserve.co.uk
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