FIERCE CREATURES
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Universal) Starring: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin. Screenplay: John Cleese and Iain Johnstone. Producers: Michael Shamberg and John Cleese. Directors: Robert Young and Fred Schepisi. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (strong language, adult themes) Running Time: 95 mintues. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In case you were unclear on this point, FIERCE CREATURES is _not_ technically a sequel to A FISH CALLED WANDA...though for the life of me I can't figure out why that was the case. It isn't as though John Cleese had a radically different idea in mind for reuniting the four principal cast members. Cleese again plays a flustered authority figure; Kevin Kline again plays a libidinous boor; Jamie Lee Curtis again plays a tough bombshell who uses Kline and seduces Cleese; Michael Palin again plays an animal lover with a distinctive speech pattern. A great deal of effort went into reminding you why you might have enjoyed A FISH CALLED WANDA, and then FIERCE CREATURES only delivers halfway. Though buoyed by a couple of wildly farcical set pieces, FIERCE CREATURES often feels like a film in search of an identity.
FIERCE CREATURES opens in Atlanta, where Octopus Inc., run by multi-billionaire communications tycoon Rod McCain (Kline), has just acquired a company which owns a small British zoo. Determined to make the zoo just as profitable as his other subsidiaries, McCain assigns former police chief Rollo Lee (Cleese) the job of whipping the place into shape. Rollo's plan is to weed out the tamest of the animals, leaving only the most vicious beasts to attract customers, a plan which outrages staff members like zookeeper Bugsy (Palin). The zoo does begin to make more money, but a couple of opportunistic Octopus employees hope for even bigger things. Marketing whiz Willa Weston (Curtis) hopes to create a zoo franchise which will make her career, while McCain's ne'er-do-well son Vince (also played by Kline) hopes to line his pockets with the zoo's profits while turning it into a giant billboard.
I don't blame the makers of FIERCE CREATURES for making its main characters so similar to those in WANDA, because they were simply following a time-honored tradition for recurring comic teams. From Abbott and Costello through Spade and Farley, it has been understood that it is important for roles to be defined. Id is id and ego is ego and never the twain should meet; what would the audience make of it if Curly suddenly began to browbeat Moe? The problem with FIERCE CREATURES isn't that its characters are familiar, it is that they are just familiar enough to be disappointing. Cleese does the put-upon bit, but he's not put-upon _enough_; Kline does the dense bit, but he's not dense _enough_. The foursome found a dynamic in A FISH CALLED WANDA which worked to perfection, and there are at least a few references in FIERCE CREATURES intended to capitalize on that goodwill. The script simply leaves you waiting on several occasions, waiting for it to take an extra comedic step which doesn't come.
WANDA also featured the delightful sub-text of the clash between British and American cultures, and FIERCE CREATURES chooses corporate avarice and gross commercialism as its satirical targets. Yet there too the script by Cleese and Iain Johnstone is disappointingly half-hearted with its jabs. The ruthless tycoon played by Kline is clearly modeled after Ruppert Murdoch, yet he escapes with no more interesting a character trait than occasional flatulence; the outrageous possibilities of a zoo with a ton of corporate sponsors yield some amusing results (particularly the zoo uniforms covered in more labels than a stock car), but there is no major payoff. It is surprising primarily because Cleese did a funnier and more concise job of skewering advertising in the Schwepps spot which accompanied the American video release of WANDA, a spot recalled by an advertisement Cleese wears on the back of his suit coat in CREATURES.
FIERCE CREATURES does have its moments, most of them coming in the last half hour as the zoo employees (including a soft-hearted Cleese) try to save the zoo from closure. There are a pair of winning scenes in the classic farce tradition of slamming doors and near misses, one in a hotel room and the other involving the younger McCain's attempt to impersonate his father, yet that latter scene also reminds you of what is missing in much of the humor in FIERCE CREATURES. A FISH CALLED WANDA was infamous as the film which had the audacity to make fun of dogs being killed in unusual ways, to use stuttering as a comic device. Until the finale of FIERCE CREATURES, which includes a startling bit of black humor, the film feels terribly tame. The animals in this film aren't subjected to cruel fates; they are photographed in all their quirky cuteness for "awww" moments and used for sometimes amusing slapstick comedy. Too many things about FIERCE CREATURES feel just slightly askew, like the conflicted results of film-makers trying both to remind you of something and to make something completely different. Part of that may be the result of two directors (Robert Young and Fred Schepisi), but ultimately much of the responsibility comes back to Cleese. At times, his work sparks memories not just of WANDA's outrageousness, but of classic Monty Python as well; at other times, he seems to have softened with age. He is just one of several creatures in FIERCE CREATURES which isn't quite fierce enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Wanda-be's: 5.
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