‘The In-Laws’

With laudable efforts by Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, this film tries too hard to wed action and sentimental comedy.   [PG-13]

By: Bob Brown

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From left: Maria Ricossa, Ryan Reynolds and Lindsay Sloane share a family moment in The In-Laws.


  Think 007 meets The Father of the Bride and you have The In-Laws.
   Andrew Fleming, who directed the very funny Dick (1999), has tried to squeeze some laughs from this situation, but the tube runs out. Screenwriters Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon base their sputtering work on Andrew Bergman’s screenplay from the 1979 film of the same name. (Bergman later directed other inspired madcap comedies, including The Freshman and Honeymoon in Vegas. But not every director can hit the nail on the head every time.)
   This remake could have been better, and it is promising in fits and starts. But sustaining the zaniness at a high pitch is difficult to do, even with the best of casts. (The earlier film billed itself as "The first Certified Crazy Person’s Comedy" in an age when madcap was the comedy standard.)
   Steve Tobias (Michael Douglas) is your workaday deep-cover CIA agent who tries to juggle business with family life. It’s tough getting to a dinner party with prospective in-laws when your jet develops engine trouble returning from a shoot-out. Jerry Peyser (Albert Brooks) is a divorced podiatrist whose daughter, Melissa (Lindsay Sloane), is engaged to Steve’s son, Mark (Ryan Reynolds). When Steve arrives at Jerry’s place two hours late, he apologizes and offers to buy them all dinner at a great ethnic restaurant. "How ethnic?" Jerry wants to know.
   Pretty ethnic it turns out. Everyone is seated at one end or another of the main course, a giant boa constrictor draped around the table banquet style. "You aren’t eating your food," Steve complains to Jerry. "I don’t think it’s finished eating," Jerry whines. Meanwhile, Jerry stumbles in on one of Steve’s undercover transactions gone awry in the restaurant men’s room. The furious punch-out between Steve and a thug sends Jerry off in a huff. But there’s no escaping the James Bond-ish intrigue that intertwines with wedding plans. The young couple are increasingly frustrated by their fathers’ erratic behavior, which spans two continents and $172 million in cash and bearer bonds.
   Of course what fun would it be without the FBI in pursuit of Steve and, by association, Jerry? The mild-mannered podiatrist comes to be identified as a gangster, "Big Cobra" (a phallic reference, which descends to anachronistic gay-baiting humor). He’s also the object of the evil mastermind Jean-Pierre Thibodoux (David Suchet), who finds him irresistible. The real crime is wasting Suchet’s marvelous talent in this embarrassing, throwaway role. The more he tries to call off the wedding, the more Jerry is pulled into Steve’s world. And the more Steve sees of Jerry’s world, the more he realizes his failures as a husband and a father.
   Although not a comedian per se, Douglas has played his share of humorous manic characters, and he handles the role of Steve with a fine sense of timing. But let’s face it — he’s too old to match well with his young assistant Angela (Robin Tunney) and to do some of Steve’s stunts, just as Roger Moore was one film too long in the tooth to remain 007. Brooks has always played the sad-sack whiner to perfection. It’s a character he has honed, not only as a comic actor, but also as a writer, from Lost in America (1985) to The Muse (1999). It’s a shame he didn’t have a hand in the script for this film. Perhaps his clever repartee wouldn’t have been so thin by comparison with his other work.
   The young couple are just cutouts, unfortunately. They’re required only to look worried, affectionate and jealous by turns. Any 20-somethings could have done the job, considering how little the script requires. Whether their wedding comes off or not is almost irrelevant.
   What eventually derails the comedy juggernaut is its sentimental vein, which is introduced to solve all the problems and tie things off with a wedding. Steve’s ex-wife, Judy (Candace Bergen), is more than goofy enough to have been half the reason their marriage failed. She brings a Buddhist monk (Drew Lee) to share the proceedings with the rabbi (Cara Pifko), who finds him "crazy." The screenplay can’t seem to decide how to balance the sentimental and the antic, however, so the laughs begin to fall flat. As for the brand of humor as a whole, it’s too heavy on gay jokes and drunk jokes to raise itself even to a modest level of sophistication.
   Besides Steve and Judy’s, the marriage that really failed in this film is the uneasy coupling of action film with sentimental comedy. It’s hard to pull even one of these genres off without trying to make them both work together, hand in hand. Let’s hope Melissa and Mark find happiness together as they run off into sunset, away from the dumbness of their elders — not that we really care.
Rated PG-13. Contains suggestive humor, profanity, some drug references and violence.