THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE

INTRODUCTION: OK not my usual choice of viewing matter but it was like this, my train was delayed getting into Birmingham and I missed the first showing of "Seven Years in Tibet" so I had a couple of hours to waste before the next showing. "The Man Who Knew Too Little" was short and it was on. You may have guessed from this that I wasn't exactly going in with high hopes, and the fact that I once again found myself relegated to Odeon 8, the home of bad comedy (I saw "Beavis & Butthead Do America" and "Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence" there), did not help. But this is probably the best mind-set to take to this film. 

SYNOPSIS: Wallace (Murray) receives as a birthday present from his brother entrance to 'The Theatre Of Life" an improv. group that performs on the streets of the big city, with the customer as the major character, tailoring their performance to his needs, but something goes wrong and Wallace's life is put into danger. 

REVIEW: OK the whole thing has a touch of the Mike Meyers, i.e. it's entertaining enough but you can't helping feeling you've seen it all before. But this is, in fact, the polar opposite of "The Game". The protagonist in "The Game" mistakes the performance for real life, whereas the protagonist in "The Man Who Knew Too Little" mistakes real life for the performance. Also unlike "The Game" it doesn't miss-advisedly consider itself a masterpiece and neither can you guess the ending within the first five minutes. 

Murray seems a tad miscast as the well meaning doofus, as he is always best in his brash acerbic persona, but here he successfully pulls off the sort of role Sellers and Lewis excelled at. Murray is undoubtedly the most versatile of his contemporaries, as demonstrated when viewing this film in conjunction with "Wild Things". He has managed to outlive both Belushi as well as the careers of Ackroyd & Chase. Is it any wonder he wants no part of the planned Ghostbusters sequels, especially in view of Ackroyd's 'work' on "Blues Brothers 2000". Where Murray is superior to his former SNL colleagues, and indeed the reason for this films success, is that he has never taken himself or his 'art' seriously, he is happy just to put out broad-appeal comedy capers, like this. 

Gallagher and Whalley perform their straight man roles adequately while a backing cast of British stalwarts including Molina, Wilson, Geraldine James, Simon Chandler, Cliff Parisi, John Thomson and Dexter Fletcher just have fun with what is after all a rare opportunity. 

It's all a bit cliched right down to the 70's style title and the Brits playing dodgy Russians. Incidentally why are Russian assassins always called Kropotkin? Pyotr Kropotkin was one of the most original political thinkers to rise out of pre-Revolutionary Russia, and to be remembered only for the chorus of comedy villains named after him seems a tad unfair. 

The script is a bit patchy, often descending to 'flushing' and 'floater', the more obvious comedy moments are passed up and the Russian folk dance routine is dragged out a bit to long, but who studies this shit too closely anyway? It doesn't contain the answer to life's many mysteries, it isn't mystically illuminating about the nature of the universe and it is undoubtedly a complete waste of an hour and a half of your life that you will never be able to recover, but it is very pleasant if that's what you're looking for, and I was.

There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes; a night in with the evil Dr. Kropotkin or watching half of "Deep Impact" spring to mind. 

Mutt's Rating: ***

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