Now that the Oscars have come and gone, so begins the season where Hollywood purges all of its duds in the hope, that we (the critics) will forget them by year’s end. Screenwriter Tom Schulman’s directorial debut is one such feeble miscue that can’t be saved by the star power of Joe Pesci and David Spade.
Pesci plays a Mafia thug (what else?) who must bring proof of a hit-eight heads in a duffel bag-to his higher ups. His aging, middle rank mobster is in a similar predicament as Al Pacino’s tragic Lefty in “Donnie Brasco,” except that Pesci finds himself trapped in an ill-fated comedy.
Inevitably, Pesci gets the bag mixed up with a college kid (newcomer Andy Comeau, who looks like John Cusack) and must track down Comeau who is on
vacation in Mexico with his girlfriend (Kristy Swanson) and her parents
(George Hamilton and a hysterical Dyan Cannon). The potentially funny farce
about a misplaced bag turns into a boorish road movie that is ostensibly a
surreal synthesis of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” and Sam Peckinpah’s under
appreciated “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”
