MEET WALLY SPARKS
A film review by Walter Frith
Copyright 1997 Walter Frith
The outrageous antics of comedian Rodney Dangerfield are seen in such hilarious films as 'Caddyshack' (1980), 'Easy Money' (1983) and 'Back to School' (1986). 'Back to School' is probably the funniest and most likable of these films but Dangerfield (who is 75) has lost his way pretty much with 'Meet Wally Sparks'.
Rodney portrays an unorthodox tabloid talk show host who becomes mixed up in one wild situation with a southern governor and his family who are extremely conservative. Dangerfield's son becomes romantically involved with the governor's daughter and a television executive's assistant who's trying to have Rodney fired is in tow and gets exactly what he deserves. Throw in a political sex scandal and a head butting feud with Dangerfield's television boss (Burt Reynolds) and you have the makings for a trivial and desperate comedy of enormously bad proportions.
Someone should have told Dangerfield (who co-wrote the picture) that less is sometimes more and that good comedy doesn't necessarily include throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in order to make people laugh and the film degrades not only itself but the audience. Furthermore the film is bogged down with Dangerfield's one liners that are growing tiresome. It's slapstick humour is both juvenile and self defeating. Given the limited release this film had, I suspect that it may have been considered at some point as a direct to video release.
Dangerfield's fans will be pleased but others may feel that even though we somehow know what to expect going in, we don't expect the humour to hammer us over the head like a baseball bat.
OUT OF 5> *
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