The comedy My Cousin Vinny is, more or less, a fish-out-of-water story involving a newly-certified Brooklyn attorney's attempts to keep his young cousin (Ralph Macchio) and his friend (Mitchell Whitfield) out of the electric chair when they are wrongly accused of murdering a gas-station clerk while on a road trip through Alabama. The attorney of the title, played with verve and nice timing by Joe Pesci, has a hellcat fiancé named Mona Lisa (Marisa Tomei) and they fight constantly. Together, they are unkempt, generally without class and generally substitute all adjectives with curse words. A few decades earlier, they would have been played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

Directed by Jonathan Lynn, Vinny was the sole success out of what was a bumbling campaign to sell Pesci as a leading man. After his head-turning supporting role in Goodfellas and his inclusion in the box-office leviathan known as Home Alone, the actor's ingrained born-and-raised-Newark attitude looked to be the selling point for a number of clunkers including The Super, The Public Eye, and With Honors. Whereas those films seemed to depend on nothing but Pesci's delivery and shovelfuls of hollow sentimentality, Vinny was all low-gear comedy with good supporting actors and a feisty script with lots of gaffs and guffaws.

The character of Vincent Gambini works as a sort of inversion of John Cleese's character in A Fish Called Wanda. Pesci plays the blatant themes very nicely -- he uses sarcasm and his expressive face to counter most attempts at melodrama. Watching the film, you would hardly know that two lives are on the line. Smartly using all his faculties, the screenwriter Dale Launer, who also serves as producer here, gives some great interactions between Vinny and the sober, draconian judge (Fred Gwyne), the amicable arresting officer (Bruce McGill), and the friendly-but-focused prosecutor (the seasoned character actor Lane Smith).

The orange rhinoceros that must be addressed here is Tomei and her notorious Oscar win. At the time a member of an off-off Broadway theater company, Brooklyn-born Tomei immediately found support from critics for her squirrel-voiced mechanic goddess with that huge bob of squid-ink-black hair. What always struck me more than her admirable timing is her interaction with Pesci; two stubborn and smart cheetahs in a town of bobcats. The key scene of the film is an argument on a hotel bed over a leaky sink which slowly builds a strong undercurrent of sexuality as it goes on. Early on, Vinny's cousin says his family loves to argue -- no wonder: It doubles as an aphrodisiac.

My Cousin Vinny is big and broad but that isn't to say its final outcome is an easy task. "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard," Edmund Gwen famously said, and the majority of Lynn's film is very funny. There's a glut of great running gags, the best of which involves Vinny refusing to fight a local hick until he raises $200. The film is plagued by an illogical setup -- how were they never informed that they were arrested for murder? -- a noticeable blemish but not a mighty hindrance, seeing as it can be explained away with three simple words: It's the South.

The Blu-ray version of the film includes a commentary from the director.