Amos & Andrew

When famous Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sterling (Samuel L. Jackson) moves into a new home on a New England resort island, he is mistaken by his new neighbors Phil (Michael Lerner) and Judy Gillman (Margaret Colin) as a thief because they see him through his window with his stereo equipment in his hands! They call the police. The Chief of Police Cecil Talliver (Dabney Coleman) and his band of bungling deputies show-up and then the fun begins. When Talliver realizes that he and his deputies have shot at a famous man, he must engineer a cover-up by using a con-artist currently incarcerated in his jail, Amos Odell (Nicolas Cage). Dabney Colman is at his best playing this sort of incompetent pompous ass character! Samuel Jackson and Nicolas Cage are believable in their roles. The whole movie is a comedy of errors with several scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny. Entertaining!

This was another underrated movie by IMDB. The acting is great, the characters are hilarious and the even though you can easily get ahead of the situations that are about to happen, I still laughed my head off. Yes, this movie is for those who love pure entertainment. It was great to see a toned down Samuel Jackson who didn't play his usual clichéd persona. Nicholas Cage, is reminiscent of his character in Raising Arizona as a bumbling idiot of a criminal. Dabney Coleman nailed it as the politically minded sheriff and the look on his face when he realizes what has just gone down is priceless. The fact that this kind of thing still happens today makes the movie a timeless classic. I highly recommend it.

When Samuel L. Jackson moves to a quiet little island to get away from the city, he's in for a lot of trouble. Arriving to the house one late afternoon, his white neighbors doesn't know he's moving in and when they see the once empty house occupied, all heck breaks loose. The neighbors run to the police to tell them a "black" man has broke into our neighbors house. Now the police, FBI, reporters, & Black Christians (don't ask) are surrounding the house. The only man who can save the night is Cage.

This film has comedy, action, and adventure just the way I like it. Nicholas Cage is hilarious and Samuel L. Jackson is superb. Great supporting cast and direction make this an instant contemporary classic. If you liked "Honey In Vegas" then you will love "Amos & Andrew". A Castle Rock Entertainment/New Line Cinema Release.

The reviews for `Amos & Andrew' are all over the place, from Leonard Maltin's `BOMB' to The Washington Post Style section critic's rave (though the Post's Weekend section reviewer gave it a devastating pan).

Any movie that gets this range of reaction is not all bad, and `Amos & Andrew' has a number of redeeming values.

Its racial satire (which can be serious as well as slapstick, often in the same minute) seems a natural extension of Stanley Kramer's `The Defiant Ones' (1958). In both films, a white and a black man are handcuffed together and escaping from the law.

The differences between the films are telling, however. In `Defiant,' both men are racists. They know little about each other's race, except what they think is the bad stuff (if I remember the film correctly). But both are poor and, as the film reveals, have much more in common than they thought.

In `A&A,' the black man is a third generation, college-educated upper middleclass professional. He has succeeded in a white world (Pulitzer-prize; well-paid for his books and screenplays; a celebrity and a college professor; and more). But he still dislikes and distrusts whites, with reason.

The white man is a drifter and petty thief, but he doesn't dislike blacks; indeed, he probably knows them better than the black man. And he's as much an outsider as the black man.

These ideas, and the comedy evolving from them, make `A&A' fascinating and, sometimes in a simplistic way, thought-provoking. The humor often is sharp and funny, though it can become too silly and off the point. So the film is both clever and stupid, original and cliché.

I often found myself laughing out loud as the film piled on smart gag after smart gag, slowing down only at the obvious, familiar and overplayed ones.

Some may find the basic premise, a black man thought to be a burglar only because he's seen in a house in an exclusive white neighborhood, as tasteless and offensive, or at least not played out with sufficient outrage.

Others may be grateful that such a pointed idea was dramatized without self-righteous anger and superiority. To them, this modest, light touch conveyed the message much more effectively, especially to those who needed to hear it, than a harder-edged film might have.

Overall, there's enough good stuff in 'A&A,' including the acting by Nicholas Cage (when he still was good) and Samuel L. Jackson to push the film to a 2 ½ to 3-star rating. It's worth a look.

Clumsily written, the quasi-buddy comedy of mistaken identity stars Samuel L. Jackson as a racist writer on a posh Massachusetts island who is mistaken for being a burglar. After dodging a shower of police gunfire at his house everyone finds out that he is the person living there. Rather than face internal affairs, the cops let a car thief (Nicholas Cage) out of jail to go in the home with a shotgun and act as the `burglar'. (So the `break-in' looks fatal, for obvious reasons.)

Michael Lerner was hilarious as the hypocritical former lawyer of the Chicago 7. Giancarlo Esposito was realistic as the Louis Farrakhan-like fundamentalist. If the police weren't so unfunny (and other parts were written more cannily) it all would have been much better.