Premise: Private Eye Rigby Reardon is hired by a beautiful dame to investigate the death of her father and runs into a lot of familiar faces along the way.
I love a reminder that Hollywood is made up of a lot of people who are just dicking around. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid literally comes from Carl Reiner, Steven Martin, and George Gripe thinking it would be funny to use an out of context clip from an old movie in a new movie. They then decided to make a full movie out of that. They poured over clips from old film noirs that they could use and wrote a silly story that works them all together. This movie is complete nonsense. It's basically one joke stretched out over an entire movie*.
*And I mean streeeetched. This movie barely clocks in at 88 minutes and still sags at points.
As much as I love Steve Martin overall, I'm not as crazy about his earlier silly movies. I was frustrated by how little I connected with The Jerk, which I was hoping would be one of my favorite movies. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid has a similar over-the-top sense of humor. While I appreciated what it was doing, there wasn't much that was actually laugh out loud funny. I think this is required viewing for the Steve Martin cannon but as a noble experiment more than anything. Kind of like how Casa de mi Padre should never be forgotten among Will Ferrell's movies, even though it's not representative of his career as a whole.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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