Man Trouble

Bob Rafelson is a puzzling director. After his big successes with "Fiver Easy Pieces" and "The King of Marvin Gardens", Mr. Rafelson doesn't seem to come out with a film project that will take him back to his past glory. This is evident with the disastrous "Man Trouble" shown on cable recently.

The film is a mess. Jack Nicholson, an actor who has worked with the director before with better results, plays the main role of Harry Bliss a trainer of dogs without any redeeming qualities. Harry is married to an Oriental woman and is working his marital problems with a counselor. Harry gets involved with Ellen Barkin, who is being stalked. The solution is to get a German Shephard dog to protect her. She has moved to her sister's swanky home where probably the only funny scene happens. We watch Ms. Barkin working with the dog and all her commands have to be in German, otherwise the dog doesn't respond! The others in the cast are totally wasted. Beverly D'Angelo has some good moments. Michael McKean, Saul Rubineck, Henry Dean Stanton, are seen in supporting roles.

See if there is something else to watch, but don't make the same mistake we made.

With the talent involved here, it should have been a much better film than it is. Music by Georges Delarue, director Bob Rafelson...

Basically it's a lightweight romantic comedy which is attempting to emulate classics comedies about a rich girl meets non-rich guy (think Katherine Hepburn) but it just doesn't have the class or punch of earlier classics in this genre.

The cheap looking opening credits/cartoon are the first indication that something is amiss here. The first half is quite OK but after that, you just don't care enough about these people to stay with the film. There's something incredibly shallow about all those involved and the 'comedy' is just too obvious...problem animal, hispanic housekeeper, mismatched/deceived couples.

I don't think it's until Harry Dean Stanton makes an appearance quite late in the film that you think, aaah, now we've got a movie. But it's all too late.

Well, I saw the movie last night and have to agree with Alex here. I think most people here expected more than just an entertaining movie. The humor is based on silly situations and conversations, and if you can't laugh about something just because it's so darn silly, you indeed won't like the humor in this movie. I can appreciate that humor from time to time, and yesterday was one of those times. I expected nothing much from this movie and it turned out good for me. And Nicholson plays it alright if you ask me (since some are of another opinion here). My opinion: a nice one for down the road, when you're out of options to do something and you just want to lay back and think about nothing...

If it were not for great acting skillings by Ellen Barkin and Beverly D'Angelo, this film would never have been produced, they held up the leading male actor and the dog stole the show from everyone.

This had to be the worst film of 1992, no laughs for me at all.

MAN TROUBLE has some sort of bad pedigree. It's among Jack Nicholson's lowest rated movies and according to the IMDB trivia it went in theaters and left them after only three days which is quite surprising since Nicholson at the time was an A-list actor. So I had extremely low expectations for it but when I saw it last October I found myself kinda enjoying it for what it was. Not that I loved it but still I didn't hated like most of the other users here.

Classical singer Joan Spruance (Ellen Barkin) is divorced from the conductor and one day she finds her apartment ransacked and receives threatening phone calls by a maniac. The next day she calls guard dog trainer Harry Bliss (Nicholson) that gives her a German Shepherd and after a while Harry and Joan start to feel attracted to each other only to have Redmond Layls' (Harry Dean Stanton) lawyer offer Harry some money for retrieving a manuscript where Andy Ellerman wrote a biography of the boss. Later that night Joan is assaulted by the masked maniac tho she manages to escape. After some misunderstandings between Harry and Joan she'll be saved by Harry after Eddie Revere (who was the masked maniac all the time) wanted to dump her from a hill.

I agree with the other reviewers that in some points it was dumb but still there was a lot to like. The acting by all (Nicholson, Barkin, Stanton, Saul Rubinek and Raymond Cruz) was good and I loved the first minutes where the dog was introduced. Some of the situations made me also chuckle in some points so, based on this a movie can't be that bad.

Overall, one of the lesser movies of the stars probably because it was easy for the audience bash this movie instead of seeing it for what it is. If you manage to lower your expectations you'll end up getting a kick out of it.