The only beauty in DRS is the Riveria landscape. The plot is predictable (as is usual in comedies dealing with drifters and grafters and con-men - oh my). Glenn Headley's performance (as Janet Colgate, an innocent American who finds her naive self on the Mediterrean coast through good luck) is an effective parody of the goof-girls of earlier cinema, though the writing is so poor that the punch of her role in the plot is telegraphed much too early. Martin and Caine coast through the film, bringing nothing sharp or vinegary to roles that really need it. Martin does pull off an eerie allusion (or tribute) to Jerry Lewis, but it feels so much like an allusion that it fails as itself. (One starts thinking about Lewis instead of following the immediate story.) Such films trade on our willingness to forget how the wealthy live at the expense of those of us who work, but stop short of a critique of such exploitation. Nothing new about that, of course, and, when it's done well - as in "The Thin Man," for example - we don't care.
Review of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
