Till Death — That’s It
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I have no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic cover, which squeezes out the single’s toxic sugar until it’s just a bittersweet lament. Sometimes an artist can find meaning in what seemed empty. But usually, the mediocre just stays that way, no matter how much money and hope you toss at it — the homage as unintentional insult. This is one of those times.
But that assumes there was something golden to tarnish. For some reason, 1979’s The In-Laws, in which conniving Peter Falk and nebbishy Alan Arkin play mismatched fathers of soon-to-be-marrieds, survives as a beloved comedy — most likely because those who adore it haven’t seen it in two decades. Viewed today, Arthur Hiller’s film is sluggish and crude and has the muddied look and sound of something that was always TV-screen small. The In-Laws begs for a laugh track, but its update, polished for a new millennium, goes one worse: It begs for a laugh.
Bigger, louder, faster, more expensive-looking — hey, at least The In-Laws looks like a Hollywood movie. It’s something Jerry Bruckheimer might have produced had he not already made Bad Company. The In-Laws even opens with a bloody assassination and a Bruckheimer-style car chase set to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.” (The filmmakers, never sure from whom they’re stealing, pick many pockets.) Fleshed out by abundant gay jokes and Candice Bergen once more reduced to fingernails on a chalkboard, The In-Laws plays like a midseason replacement series.
With Michael Douglas in the Falk role and Albert Brooks in the Arkin part, this contemporary In-Laws takes enough from Andrew Bergman’s original screenplay to be called a remake. (Writer Nat Mauldin, responsible as well for Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle and 1996’s The Preacher’s Wife, is a virtual one-man cover band.) Mauldin and director Andrew Fleming (Dick) have gone bigger (currency-manufacturing plates stolen from the Federal Reserve have morphed into a killer submarine) and broader (Brooks, as podiatrist Jerry Peyser, dons a thong, hops in a hot tub and shares a man-on-man kiss, all in the span of a few seconds). Their version is slapstick hoping to disguise a paucity of wit.
It winds up like all Hollywood comedies these days — merely resembling something funny, offering up what you presume are jokes because every line is exclaimed and followed by a wink. You half expect Douglas to look into the camera and say, “C’mon, now that was funny.”
Brooks, once a wonderfully wry cultural critic as actor and filmmaker in such films as Real Life and Modern Romance, is left with little to do except yell at Douglas. As his own movies slide headlong into mawkishness, his roles in the films of others (My First Mister, say) render him merely bungling and sad, a prematurely old man.
