Arts & Entertainment : Friday, August 27, 1999
'Dudley Do-Right': They eluded the humor dragnet
by Keith Simanton
Special to The Seattle Times
It's my position that "Dudley
Do-Right" isn't actually a movie. I think it's more likely a top-secret
collaboration between Universal Pictures and the government; some kind of
group comedy-deprivation experiment. There's little else to explain how the
first 40 minutes of this film were hermetically sealed and vacuumed free of
all humor.
| Movie review Rating: * 1/2 "Dudley Do-Right," with Brendan Fraser, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alfred Molina. Written and directed by Hugh Wilson. 85 minutes. Several theaters. "PG" - Parental guidance advised because of mild comic action violence, and for brief language and innuendo. |
Dudley is a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, minus the comic piece de resistance of swinging into tree trunks. The script, seemingly purchased at a duty-free shop, follows Dudley as he tries to foil the evil schemes of Snidely Whiplash (Alfred Molina). Whiplash's dastardly scheme starts when he runs out all the residents of Semi-Happy Valley with rumors of vampires in the woods.
Then he proceeds to salt the rivers and mines with gold nuggets, thus ensuring a gold rush. Whiplash, who now controls the town, makes a fortune when the gold fever hits. He even wins the fickle little heart of Nell Fenwick (Sarah Jessica Parker), Dudley's childhood sweetheart.
Writer/director Hugh Wilson, who has made entertaining movies before ("Blast From the Past," "First Wives Club"), starts off this nonsense with a prologue of the three principals - Dudley, Snidely and Nell - as children. The sequence isn't funny and it's unnecessary; Wilson never regains the viewer's trust. Next up is a sequence of bad slapstick, with Dudley in his Mountie station - which takes the rest of the film out at the knees.
Wilson also injects three dance numbers, also not funny and also not necessary, that show just how badly conceived and scattershot this project was. There is an enjoyable ballroom dance scene, there for pure entertainment value, then two Vegas-like sendups, taking pot shots at Cirque du Soleil and "Riverdance." One is too obscure and the other cliched. Then there's a protracted, suspense-less motocross chase.
"Oh, good," I actually said aloud in the theater, "motocross."
The best thing that can be said for "Do-Right" is that there's some nice work by Eric Idle (as the Sutter-like prospector of the gold rush), Robert Prosky (who does a reasonable Inspector Fenwick imitation) and Alex Rocco (humorous as an Indian chief).
These character actors seem to be the "control elements" of the experiment: injecting actual humor in "Do-Right" 's brief running time to ensure scientific integrity. Goodness knows what Universal and the government hope to do with the data collected from this sick study, but they're probably concocting a comedy bomb so large that it will level nations just by its release. Isn't there a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" movie coming out?
