I'm a fan from the earliest days of both Tom Hanks & John Candy, but this movie never delivers on any of the comic potential both actors had at the time. Hanks and Candy played brothers in the funny Splash (1984), but neither did as well with their characters in this film.
I suppose it was the weak script, because they are good comic actors, and Nicholas Meyer is a good director who had already proved that to me a few years prior with Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, if not in earlier flicks like Time After Time (1979) and The Seven Percent Solution (1976).
The identity-switch premise is standard comic fare, and we know that in the end, the Hanks character will take on the identity he is faking and do what that character would do. Likewise for getting the girl.
Hanks & Candy could have carried off the predictable jokes a lot better than they did, and the Candy set-up for the brainwashing in the swipe of a screen was so weak I almost missed it. The joke of his babbling communist slogans and rhetoric back at his captors to the point of annoyance is just that: annoying. It too, could have worked better.
Rita Wilson was a poor choice as the love-interest. I guess she's okay in minor supporting roles, and I know a few people who liked her as the love-interest in Mixed Nuts (1994), but in this role, her exasperation with life in the jungle jokes, in juxtaposition to Hanks' ease with it, are weakly played and not very funny.
There are some spots where the script allows the actors to be funny, but they are few and far between, and often underplayed. I know enough of the tastes of my friends and clients to say there are about half of them who would like this movie okay enough, and half who would wish they had watched something else, like Splash, if they wanted to see Hanks & Candy together.
Thus, I would rate this movie as Average (5 out of 10), but just barely. If you find it in a bargain-bin, as I did, you might want to pick it up if you are a Hanks and Candy fan and already have Splash, but I would rather spend my money on the latter if I didn't already have it.
I suppose it was the weak script, because they are good comic actors, and Nicholas Meyer is a good director who had already proved that to me a few years prior with Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, if not in earlier flicks like Time After Time (1979) and The Seven Percent Solution (1976).
The identity-switch premise is standard comic fare, and we know that in the end, the Hanks character will take on the identity he is faking and do what that character would do. Likewise for getting the girl.
Hanks & Candy could have carried off the predictable jokes a lot better than they did, and the Candy set-up for the brainwashing in the swipe of a screen was so weak I almost missed it. The joke of his babbling communist slogans and rhetoric back at his captors to the point of annoyance is just that: annoying. It too, could have worked better.
Rita Wilson was a poor choice as the love-interest. I guess she's okay in minor supporting roles, and I know a few people who liked her as the love-interest in Mixed Nuts (1994), but in this role, her exasperation with life in the jungle jokes, in juxtaposition to Hanks' ease with it, are weakly played and not very funny.
There are some spots where the script allows the actors to be funny, but they are few and far between, and often underplayed. I know enough of the tastes of my friends and clients to say there are about half of them who would like this movie okay enough, and half who would wish they had watched something else, like Splash, if they wanted to see Hanks & Candy together.
Thus, I would rate this movie as Average (5 out of 10), but just barely. If you find it in a bargain-bin, as I did, you might want to pick it up if you are a Hanks and Candy fan and already have Splash, but I would rather spend my money on the latter if I didn't already have it.