This present-day spoof of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic is as unfunny, tasteless and tawdry as American comedy gets. At one point, we're even expected to guffaw as a man squirts sulphuric acid on his face. Elsewhere, the purpose of the script seems to be to humiliate ambitious career-women in general, and Sean Young in particular. After her performance in Ace Ventura Pet Detective , it was hard to believe she could put herself through worse humiliation, but here's the horrible evidence.
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Sample line: (to Ms Hyde)"You look as though you need something long and stiff."
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MIXED
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Daly's easy charm and Young's full-blooded treachery go a long way to smooth over the picture's rough edges.
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(Variety) |
ANTI
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This tragic waste of celluloid must ostensibly be labeled a comedy, but it's more of a bomb-edy: Few films in recent memory offer fewer laughs.
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(Sean O'Neill, Box Office) |
Smutty, brainless... As Daly and Young switch identities back and forth, the movie plods from one lame joke (an elderly woman is aghast at catching sight of Daly's privates) to the next (Young plays simultaneous footsie with two male executives at a business meeting). Perhaps only Jim Carrey - playing both roles -could have saved this dumb-and-dumber romp.
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(Leah Rozen, People Weekly) |
A typical thesaurus includes some 350 synonyms for the word bad - an alarming number of which apply to this thoroughly misbegotten outing.
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(Premiere) |
Ham-fisted farce.
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(Kim Newman, Sight & Sound) |
Apart from being a travesty of Stevenson, it is so crass, witless and misogynistic that it makes Confessions of a Window Cleaner look like Dostoevsky.
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(Hugo Davenport, Daily Telegraph) |
When the best bits of the film are all in the trailer and the trailer's embarrassingly bad, you're really in trouble... The entire cast here is in desperate straits here, and deserves your sympathy, if not your support.
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(David Quinlan, TV Film and Video Guide, 1997) |