Mr. Cranky's rating:
If you bottled Matthew Perry's talent and tried to sell it as cologne, it would smell like the innards of a rotting corpse and come in an eyedropper.
I can't help but think that if you bottled Matthew Perry's talent and tried to sell it as cologne, it would smell like the innards of a rotting corpse and come in an eyedropper. Can this man do anything else but play Chandler Bing? Does anybody care? People with actual acting talent, like Robert De Niro and Denzel Washington, must look at the movie salaries of the "Friends" gang and yearn to impale themselves on the nearest sharp object.
Oh, and what an original vehicle in which to insert Chandler -- a funny gangster film! Har har! Perry plays Chandler playing a Montreal dentist named Oz, whose wife, Sophie (Rosanna Arquette), would like to see him dead. When hit man Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis) moves in next door, things get all out of whack.
Chandler and Jimmy take a liking to each other. Sophie tries to get Jimmy to kill Chandler. Chandler ends up in Chicago, gets mixed up with Jimmy's old boss, Janni (Kevin Pollak), and falls in love with Jimmy's wife (Natasha Henstridge). He comes back to Montreal with Jimmy's pal, Frankie (Michael Clarke Duncan), and they all join forces, along with Chandler's dental assistant (Amanda Peet), to outwit the soon-to-arrive Janni. Yup, this kinda thing happens all the time.
Janni is Hungarian and his "V's" sound like "W's" and vice-versa. This is the kind of humor that seems funny on paper, but results in a bullet right between the eyes in real life. Any guy who sounds that stupid could never head a gang except in the movies. Likewise, anybody as careless as Jimmy would never live to see Montreal. This movie was probably pitched as "Pulp Fiction with Chandler," a proposition only half as frightening as the fact that some Hollywood microceph actually swallowed it.
Was it really that bad?
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