Columbo is attending the wedding of his nephew to a budding young model. After the celebrations Columbo is about to head home until he gets paged by nephew Andy who tells him that he came out of the shower to find Melissa missing. Columbo looks around and finds evidence of a kidnapping. He starts investigating further while Andy calls in other officers to help out. Meanwhile, as tensions built between the men, Melissa wakes up bound and gagged in a strange room with her captor planning to make himself her second husband.
If you loved spaghetti bolognese and someone told you that that they were going to make it with potatoes instead of spaghetti then you may rightly say "whoa, slow down chef boy don't mess with a winning formula". So as a Columbo fan, when one of the films goes way off the usual formula, it gives me pause to worry that perhaps it is not the wisest thing. However, despite knowing this was not a normal episode, I decided to give it a go because just because something is different doesn't mean it isn't any good. The fact that it is different is a problem though too many characters, no cat and mouse stuff and none of the opportunities for Columbo to be, well, Columbo. It doesn't help either that the story is poor it is not clever but rather solved by simple, plodding police work; nothing wrong with that but it doesn't make for an interesting film. The cuts to the kidnapped Melissa are no help at all as they rarely have anything approaching tension. I hate to say it but I was genuinely bored by the end of it it rarely had anything typically Columbo about it and it failed to be what it apparently was aiming to be.
Falk does his best to lift this thing but without any frame of reference his character is a bit lost and his performance isn't up to much. The vast array of supporting characters undermine him and reduce his screen time significantly. Calabro is OK but nothing special while Going is a strange mix she does "frightened and a bit spooked" quite well but other than that is as expressive as a blank piece of paper. The support features a surprising amount of familiar, if not famous, faces. Don Swayze is a strange find but his one-note psycho with a singsong voice gets old very quickly. The rest are bland but does include Frasier's Bulldog (Butler), Clear Present Danger's President (Moffat), Red For Red October's Davis, baseball player Pierce and the A-Team's LeGault shame none of them add anything other than a distraction to the dull story.
Overall one of the weakest Columbo films I've seen. It goes miles from formula but offers nothing else of interest in its place. I understand the difficulty for writers to reproduce the same formula every time while also making it fresh and entertaining so I can understand why they tried to do something else. However I cannot fathom why they wanted to jump so far away from it and try to be something completely different. Only one moment really worked for me and that was at the very end when Columbo asked "what time is it", only for the time to be typed on screen as it had been all film at least it showed that someone was keen to have a laugh and poke some fun at the rather turgid, humourless affair that had gone before.
