Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo prove to be a solid comedy team in this fairly amusing skewering of mob movies. They play two glorified errand boys for a Newark mobster (Dan Hedaya). When compulsive gambler DeVito causes Hedaya to lose a lot of money at the horse races, Hedaya decides that whacking them won't send enough of a message. No, he decides to test their loyalty to each other by assigning each man to bump the other one off.
This sets in motion a series of wacky comic misadventures that is not the "almost total misfire" that this viewer was told it was. Granted, some jokes & gags do work better than others, but director Brian De Palma certainly knows his way around a serious crime or mob film, and he displays a good touch with this comic approach to such stories. Written by George Gallo (who hit it big two years later with his script for "Midnight Run"), it gets a lot of mileage out of the chemistry between the two leads. De Palma had seen them in the 1984 mob spoof "Johnny Dangerously", and had laughed heartily enough to want to put them to use here. They're surrounded by a top supporting cast: Harvey Keitel, Ray Sharkey, Patti LuPone, Julie Bovasso, Frank Vincent, etc. Wrestler Captain Lou Albano goes WAY over the top in a priceless way as a psychotic muscle man, Frank "The Fixer" Acavano.
See this one for yourself and you'll see that it does provide *some* laughs. At the least, it does have plenty of energy and a decent pace, wrapping up in a very trim 92 minutes, and delivering a satisfactory denouement.
Seven out of 10.
This sets in motion a series of wacky comic misadventures that is not the "almost total misfire" that this viewer was told it was. Granted, some jokes & gags do work better than others, but director Brian De Palma certainly knows his way around a serious crime or mob film, and he displays a good touch with this comic approach to such stories. Written by George Gallo (who hit it big two years later with his script for "Midnight Run"), it gets a lot of mileage out of the chemistry between the two leads. De Palma had seen them in the 1984 mob spoof "Johnny Dangerously", and had laughed heartily enough to want to put them to use here. They're surrounded by a top supporting cast: Harvey Keitel, Ray Sharkey, Patti LuPone, Julie Bovasso, Frank Vincent, etc. Wrestler Captain Lou Albano goes WAY over the top in a priceless way as a psychotic muscle man, Frank "The Fixer" Acavano.
See this one for yourself and you'll see that it does provide *some* laughs. At the least, it does have plenty of energy and a decent pace, wrapping up in a very trim 92 minutes, and delivering a satisfactory denouement.
Seven out of 10.