The Out-of-Towners

The Out Of Towners a good clean fun comedy starring one of my favourite comedy actress' Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin.The Out Of Towners is a movie about a married couple played by Hawn and Martin and there adventures in New York. You shouldn't expect to much of this movie, just the fact that's it's a good fun movie with good performances

Goldie Hawn is a wonderful comedy actress; Steve Martin is a wonderful comedy actor; Neil Simon is a wonderful comedy writer; and New York City is a wonderful place to use as a setting for a movie. Yet, this movie is a clunker; it's as flat as a pancake, and an overcooked one at that. Although certain scenes do provoke a laugh, in general this movie simply is not funny. The story is a pure Hollywood comedy potboiler, that is, a formula movie and a poor retread of the 1970 original, which itself wasn't the funniest movie either, but that's for another review. The idea of everything going wrong during a trip is nothing new, but if properly treated it can produce laughs. But in this movie the things that go wrong are so absurd and contrived that the laughs are lost. What happens to the Clarks would not and could not happen to anyone else, hence the movie becomes irrelevant to the audience and loses its meaning as a satire or parody. John Cleese provides some humor as the hotel manager but his presence is limited and in no way comes close to rescuing this movie from its essential banality.

Henry and Nancy Clark have been married for 24 years and it is starting to show. Henry has lost his job but has kept it secret and plans to get a new job in New York. Having had their last child move out of the house the day before, Nancy isn't sure what to do with her time and decides to join Henry on his trip to New York. However a fog-bound city sees them diverted to Boston and struggling to get to their destination. Actually getting into Manhattan is only the first challenge in an eventful 24 hours that could only happen in New York!

Nothing about this film suggested that it would be anything special; in fact the presence of Marc Lawrence as writer only promised the sort of safely comic humour that he produced with Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality and similar projects. And from the very start it is obvious that Lawrence has produced his usual standard and that director Weisman has no aspirations to do more than churn out a rather derivative but amusing rom-com. So that is just what we get and if that is OK with you then you should be alright, although hardly impressed. The plot bumbles along from one unlikely scenario to the next; most of them are ho-hum but occasionally it tickled me. Most viewers (myself included) will find it all a bit obvious and weak but the undemanding will maybe find it amusing enough to serve as a distraction.

Part of the film working (albeit on this level) is the partnership of Martin and Hawn. Even with the rather obvious material to work with, they do work well together and produce some laughs where they may not have existed on the page. Martin is only ever a hair away from mugging but, although not a shade on his former glory, he fits the lazy tone well. Hawn is a bit less convincing but is still quite amusing; the only problem with her is that she has to carry the more emotionally complex character and she can't get that right and mainly just overplays it for easy laughs, robbing the film of the engaging realism that it needed to have if it really wanted to pull off the emotional ending (which of course it doesn't actually want to do!). Cleese is embarrassing and can do nothing with the poor material he is served with – it is pretty much below him and it shows.

Overall then a totally by-the-numbers, obvious little romantic comedy. It is fairly forced and contrived which was a problem but bits of it rose above the rest and generally it provided just enough to be distracting for those in an undemanding mood. However the majority of us will see something that lacks any real effort and it doesn't encourage me to do much into it when watching. The two leads brighten it up a little bit but it is hard not to see the glaring lack of originally and spark at pretty much every turn.

Neil Simon's script for the original 1970 hit, "The Out-of-Towners," was, essentially, a one-joke skit stretched out to a feature-length film. Starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as two suburbanites from Ohio who experience a nightmare of frustrating complications when they hit the Big Apple, the film managed to generate some laughs as well as a great deal of grating repetitiousness.

The 1999 remake, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn in the central roles, manages to be a far worse film. The original at least seemed grounded in some sense of reality as the couple fell victim to a believable, if overstated, series of tourist mishaps; this version spins off into slapstick delirium, going so far as to have its main characters actually swinging on hotel signs six stories above street level and John Cleese as a snippy concierge prancing around in lady's clothing to Donna Sommer's "Bad Girls." Also, in the original, Jack Lemmon seemed determined to really take on all the people who arrayed themselves against him and the film conveyed a real sense of this implacable, almost malevolent force known as NEW YORK coming down with all its might on this innocent couple from the Midwest. In the remake, Steve Martin seems strangely passive and unharried and the victory-over-the-city theme comes along only at the very end. Without that added dimension of epic frustration, the new film robs the original of whatever audience identification it might once have had and simply devolves into an undisciplined display of unfunny slapstick.

Martin, Hawn and Cleese are game players, but this "Out-of-Towners" should indeed have been driven out of town!

I have always enjoyed Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn; however, I'm not to sure they work to well as a comedy duo. In one of Martin's previous roles he had played a dramatic role in "The Spanish Prisoner", which seemed to fit him better than play a comedic part. The jokes in this movie seemed to be old and unoriginal. I can't deny that this film was all bad; I did enjoyed bits and pieces of it; however, it seemed like it had been done before under the guise of a different movie title. It just did not have originality for me to keep my attention. It is a light hearted film that is worth seeeing at home for rent. I am just happy I didn't spend money to see at the theatres.