MAD DOG TIME
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Grade: D- // Burn the Negative
(United Artists)
Director: Larry Bishop. Screenplay: Larry Bishop. Producer: Judith Rutherford James. Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Richard Dreyfuss, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Larry Bishop, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan.
MPAA Rating: R (violence, brief nudity, sexual situations, profanity). Running Time: 95 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It is a tough call which annoying trend represented by MAD DOG TIME is more annoying. Is it the Cameo-Rama, the insistence upon turning every scene into a celebrity "Where's Waldo?" Or is it the Pulp Affliction, the impression that a film spilling over with kooky, garrulous gangsters must also be spilling over with style points? Writer-director Larry Bishop has a terrible case of both in MAD DOG TIME, a simply awful piece of pseudo-cool tripe which holds the ignominious distinction of being the 1996 heir apparent to THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD as "Film Most Likely to Make You Wish No Aspiring Director had _Ever_ Seen a Quentin Tarantino Film."
Jeff Goldblum stars as Mickey Holiday, a hired gun with more enemies than he can count. As if it weren't bad enough that everyone who can pull a trigger wants to challenge him to a quick-draw contest, Mickey now faces the return of his former boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss), a big shot who has been spending some time in a mental hospital. It seems Vic is likely to be unhappy that Mickey hooked up with Vic's girl Grace (Diane Lane) while he was away, even though Mickey is now involved with Grace's sister Rita (Ellen Barkin). Vic, however, faces problems of his own from rivals who think the time is right to move in on his territory, rivals including Jake (Kyle MacLachlan) and Ben London (Gabriel Byrne). Vic's solution to all his problems is Nick Falco (Larry Bishop), a cool gunman more than capable of dispatching each and every one of Vic's enemies.
Bishop, the son of comic Joey Bishop, clearly wanted to take a contemporary crime caper and mix it with the swingin' sensibility of his dad's old Rat Pack buddies. The soundtrack is spilling over with 40s and 50s standards, including a couple by the Chairman of the Board himself, and everyone walks around in tuxedos (for the gents) or slinky evening dresses (for the dames) radiating smoothness. However, in trying to combine OCEAN'S ELEVEN with RESERVOIR DOGS, Bishop has cranked out a script with so much utterly ridiculous dialogue that you might not even notice that you don't care a thing about anyone or anything in MAD DOG TIME. Gabriel Byrne is the worst offender, trying to make his Irish accent sound like Brooklyn Italian while blathering on about other characters in lines which mistake simple, inane rhymes and alliteration for cleverness. There is an almost hypnotic monotony to the artificial cadence of the speech in MAD DOG TIME; after a while, it begins to sound like it was written by the R-rated evil twin of Dr. Seuss.
With nothing to say and a truly grating way of saying it, Bishop resorts to trotting out cameos of guys who don't seem to belong on the same planet, let alone in the same movie. Billy Idol and Gregory Hines? Joey Bishop and Burt Reynolds? Paul Anka and Richard Pryor (whose appearance seems not only unnecessary, but just plain cruel)? Bishop even goes for obscurity points by bringing in OCEAN'S ELEVEN cast member Henry Silva as a narcoleptic hood, and flash-in-the-pan Christopher Jones of WILD IN THE STREETS as one of Goldblum's challengers. It doesn't matter that none of them has anything to do except show off a skin tone which, whether natural or induced by lighting or makeup, makes many of them look like prime candidates for the George Hamilton Memorial Melanoma Wing of Cedars-Sinai. Even the notoriously bronzed Goldblum looks like a British schoolboy next to the burnt sienna complexion of Anka, Reynolds and Bishop himself.
At times, Bishop seems to be making a desperate attempt to convince the audience that he is aware of the ludicrous excesses in MAD DOG TIME, giving Goldblum a couple of meta-conscious lines which refer to characters, situations or dialogue. There are even a couple of moderately inspired moments, like having Dreyfuss and Reynolds, owners of two of the most distinctive laughs in Hollywood, cackling away as they face each other. But when a film-maker spends this much time subjecting viewers to a story which exists only as a place to put his obnoxious Rat Pack stand-ins and have them mouth labored, grossly unfunny lines, he loses the right to pretend it's all a lark. The actors may have had fun playing versions of Frankie, Sammy, Dean and the boys, but that fun isn't likely to be shared by an audience. MAD DOG TIME is a self-indulgent homage masquerading as hipster cinema. Worse yet, it's like THE CANNONBALL RUN with cocktails and shark-skin.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 tired dogs: 1.
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