FATHER'S DAY
A film review by Steve Kong
Copyright 1997 Steve Kong
Pairing up Robin Williams and Billy Crystal for a movie sounds too good to be true. These two men, alone, are hilarious, how hysterical can they get if they are together? In Ivan Reitman's film, Father's Day, they don't get hysterical. They hardly make the audience laugh. I walked into the theatre with images from the commercials in my mind. And in the commercials, these two are hysterical.
In Father's Day, two men (Williams and Crystal) are called upon by a former romance to find a missing kid. The spin to this is that, the kid could belong to either one of them. The kid has run away from home, and his mother, because of an argument with his "father" (played by Bruce Greenwood). He has run away with a group of teenagers who are groupies following a band around the country. After waiting for Greenwood's character to chase down the kid, the mother resorts to lying to both Williams and Crystal, telling them that they are the fathers, in order to find the kid. Crystal's character lives in L.A. and Williams character lives in San Francisco, so there would be no problem there. They would never run into each other, or so the mother thinks. Crystal's character is a lawyer and just happens to have a client in San Francisco. It is here that he meets up with Williams. Unknowingly to either of them, they both go hunting for the kid together. This is where the fun is supposed to start. But it doesn't.
Now, back to the images from the commercials. If you've seen the commercial and laughed out loud at some of them, you've laughed at most of what there is to laugh at in the movie. The clips from the commercials, strangely enough, work very well in the commercials. But when you do see them on the screen they fall flat.
Stay away from this film. It's not funny at all, and I think that the studio executives relied mostly on big names to draw the audience into the theatre. How could you resist a film from Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) starring both Robin Williams and Billy Crystal? Don't fall for it. Save your money, and maybe catch this one on video.
-- steve kong boiled@earthlink.net personal site http://home.earthlink.net/~boiled/ my movie site http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/2259/
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