Review of The In-Laws

A buddy comedy with action, a mismatched couple of in-laws, loose ends and a general lack of sense. I can't claim that I had high expectations for this... but I gave it a chance, and I wanted to like it, I really did. Michael Douglas is good, as always. He delivers, action, acting and comedy. The only real problem is, apart from the first-mentioned quality, no one else delivers in this film. Brooks is usually good... at least as far as acting goes, and I could have sworn he had me laughing in at least one of his roles... maybe not film-wise, but his guest-roles on The Simpsons were hilarity itself. Reynolds has limited talent, and he's unfortunately cast, in that he isn't playing the typical womanizing teen-ish guy that we've grown used to him being. I haven't seen enough of Sloane to rate her performance according to how well she typically is, or compare her role to what she usually portrays. Tunney isn't really bad, she just has too little to do, and a character that is fairly uneven. She is a tool to bring about certain circumstances throughout, and that's too bad, because she does have some talent. One of the problems is that it's quite simply not very easy to accept these characters as people... they're too extreme, caricatures of perceptions of people. The ex-wife, for example, is stitched together of all the bad and "far out" qualities one could think of. One would hope that fairly few people in the world are quite that bizarre. The seemingly endless sub-plots are another mistake... for a film that lasts just over an hour and a half, there's story enough for a *saga*. Shakespeare could hardly have thought up more story for just one production. And they seem to just show up at random... as if the writer didn't want to deal with just one story or one pile of complications, so he had to think up more, and just kept adding until he had enough to make a film out of. The material just doesn't work well. We've seen the "odd couple" before, the idea of putting two people who have little in common isn't new... and it really isn't put to terribly good use here. The spy stuff and the action aren't bad... though the tension did seem tame at times, and the threat of the bad guys, the sense of danger just... isn't really there. Douglas makes a fine spy, though I'd wager that Peter Falk made a better one(I have yet to see the original, though I certainly intend to look for it). I didn't find the film particularly humorous... occasionally entertaining, but never really funny. The music was almost all good, though. And that's pretty much it... for those wanting spy-stuff, it'll do. And if you like your movies with a side of feel-good music, this certainly isn't the worst you could do. But for most anything else that this could offer, there are better movies out there. I rate this just above average, for the good things that it does hold. I recommend this to fans of the actors and the genre, and anyone with an hour and a half to kill who'd prefer something spy-related with music that is kind to the ears. 6/10