The Wrong Guy
This little trifle, produced way back in 1997 and only now seeing the light of day, grinds its simple, simple prmise into the ground within 10 minutes, leaving you with 84 more minutes of repetition of some occasionally sorta-funny lines and visual gags.
Dave Foley reprises the deer-in-the-headlights character he's been pushing for a decade, this time playing an executive convinced he'll be accused of murdering his boss (the usual pulling-the-bloody-knife-from-the-corpse trick). The catch is that the actual murder (and murderer) has been caught on film, so Foley's not really suspected at all.
Remember when Bill Murray made that bumbling not-a-real-spy movie The Man Who Knew Too Little? Yeah, well, neither does anyone else. It took me 20 minutes to even remember the name of it.
The Wrong Guy is pretty much the same story. Like Spy Hard proved so well, the mystery spoof genre was pretty much dead on arrival. Foley has a natural sense of comic timing and co-star/co-writer Dave Higgins does as well (though he has far less screen time). Unfortunately, the movie's stillborn story doesn't let these two work their mojo, alone or together.
Rating
2.5 out of 5 Stars
- Director: David Steinberg
- Producer: Jon Slan
- Screenwriter: Dave Foley, David Anthony Higgins, Jay Kogen
- Stars: Dave Foley, David Anthony Higgins, Jennifer Tilly, Joe Flaherty, Dan Redican, Alan Scarfe, Kenneth Welsh, Enrico Colantoni, Colm Feore
- MPAA Rating: PG-13
- Year of Release: 1997
- Released on Video: 09/24/2002
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