L'Homme à la Chaussure Rouge

A man picked randomly out of a crowd is made the target of CIA surveillance and pursuit.

As Tom Hanks himself acknowledges, the movie is not that good. The plot is okay, but a bit convoluted. The comedy is more often of the absurd kind, and I am not sure it always succeeds. Jim Belushi is rather the strong point of the comedy parts. Also, as 1980s movies end to do, a romance is thrown in for some reason... it seems somewhat forced.

What makes this movie worth watching, despite the "blah" of the overall plot and comedy, is the ensemble cast. Tom Hanks may be the star, but he probably doesn't have 50% of the screen time, because he is sharing it with Dabney Coleman, Jim Belushi, Carrie Fisher (in a small role), Charles Durning, Ed Hermann, Lori Singer, Gerrit Graham and more I'm not recalling at the moment. It is a truly impressive cast.

In a desperate attempt to keep his job as the director of the CIA "Ross" (Charles Durning) directs his assistant "Brown" (Edward Herrmann) to select a person at random and falsely suggest to his main rival "Cooper" (Dabney Coleman) that this innocent bystander has secret information that might thwart Cooper's political ambitions. To that end, Brown selects an eccentric musician named "Richard" (Tom Hanks) because he is wearing one red shoe due to a practical joke played on him by his best friend "Morris" (James Belushi). As expected, Cooper takes the bait and immediately puts all of his resources into finding out what Richard knows. However, what Cooper doesn't realize is the difficulty his agents encounter when they submerge themselves into Richard's bizarre life. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this movie started off a bit slow but got pretty funny towards the end with Morris deservedly having to endure his share of comedic mishaps. Admittedly, this wasn't a great comedy by any means but I still found it entertaining enough and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

OK, it's not the most brilliant piece of art in the world, but neither is it the turkey that the video guides make it out to be. It's a cute spy-cliché spoof with good performances from Hanks, Durning, Coleman, Belushi, Herrman and particularly Tom Noonan as the deadpan Agent Reese. Super music by Thomas Newman (one of his first scores), an elegant string of sight gags featuring Belushi and a couple of corpses, and a sweet ending scene more than make up for the underlying silliness of the plot and a handful of flatly delivered lines. Good to watch on a Sunday afternoon when you need to occupy your mind, but not TOO much.

Keep your expectations in check and you won't be disappointed. This film was hilarious! While not the best vehicle for Tom Hanks to show his talents, the movie's pacing, score, visual style, sound effects, and black humor were extremely effective. James Belushi was at his comic best as Hanks' best friend whose facial expressions constantly suggest he doesn't have a clue as to what's going on, but he's still probably the sanest person in the film. Well worth a look, despite what the other over-critical reviewers had to say.

There are many different excuses to laugh, and any film that gives us one of them falls into that big bucket we call comedy.

I don't suppose anyone knows much about what makes us laugh, but like yesterday's stock market results, everyone seems to have an opinion about failed comedy. This is a classic failed comedy, regardless of whether you thought the original French film successful.

The story is that a crew of trained professionals mistakenly assume one thing and then grind that conclusion quite literally to death. The same thing happened to the crew that made this stinker.

The women are marginally interesting. Lori singer was a real string player; here she plays the prostituting spy to a string player. Carrie Fisher was deep into her skinny drugged out highly sexed period and plays someone much the same (with a reference to Princess Leia and the wookie).

Hanks only once in a rare while really tries to act. This isn't one of those times. My own theory is that he needs a challenging director.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.