if it's possible to spoil something that's already in tatters. This is a "plot script," meant to show off the cleverness of its writer, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. For this to work, the writer must actually be clever, and the plot must make sense. This one, alas, is riddled with holes.
It also shares another fatal flaw with earlier second-raters like The Getaway (Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger) and The Silent Partner (Elliott Gould, Susannah York): even the characters we're expected to sympathize with have the moral sense of garden slugs, and no real virtues beyond the fact that they're good-looking.
Steve Martin, a dentist, has a gorgeous, charming, loving fiancée and assistant in Laura Dern, yet somehow he instantly and implausibly falls for rude, bratty, drug-addicted Helena Bonham Carter. When he discovers that she's conned him into prescribing her some drugs, he lies to cover it up. When he discovers that she's robbed his office of his entire supply of drugs and the DEA wants to know where they went, he lies to cover it up. When her psychopathic brother trashes his office, he lies to cover it up. This is the Idiot Plot Syndrome--at each move, the entire audience is cringing at the stupid mistake made by the protagonist, but each of these mistakes is essential to keep the story going, since doing the self-evidently right thing would clear up the mess and send the audience home.
Martin's childish lies eventually allow someone to frame him for murder. The cops allow an actor (Kevin Bacon), researching a role as a cop, to do the questioning. In a deus ex broken armrest, he escapes effortlessly, and immediately returns to his druggie sweetheart, even though the police are watching her.
In the end, the loving fiancée turns out to be the villainess, having hatched the whole plot in order to take ownership of his business. (A dentist office? Some motive.) She had talked his accountant into rearranging his corporate structure to make her plot possible, yet when his accountant, on the chair for some tooth drilling, began to spill the beans, it was he, not she, who insisted that the accountant shut up and submit to the nitrous oxide.
Her original idea had merely been to frame him for drug dealing, yet somehow she had had the amazing foresight to make a denture copy of his teeth, for the purpose of putting incriminating bite marks all over a dead body that only at the last moment intruded unexpectedly into her plan. In the end, she commits a second unnecessary murder, and is filmed in the act by an office video camera she knew all about. Martin, however, manages to fake his own death and abscond to France with his loser girlfriend (now miraculously cured of her addiction, and full of his child), even though it is now completely unnecessary that he run away.
I'll stop here, not because I can't think of any more flaws, but because it's pointless to do so. Maybe there's a decent Sherlock Holmes on the tube.
It also shares another fatal flaw with earlier second-raters like The Getaway (Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger) and The Silent Partner (Elliott Gould, Susannah York): even the characters we're expected to sympathize with have the moral sense of garden slugs, and no real virtues beyond the fact that they're good-looking.
Steve Martin, a dentist, has a gorgeous, charming, loving fiancée and assistant in Laura Dern, yet somehow he instantly and implausibly falls for rude, bratty, drug-addicted Helena Bonham Carter. When he discovers that she's conned him into prescribing her some drugs, he lies to cover it up. When he discovers that she's robbed his office of his entire supply of drugs and the DEA wants to know where they went, he lies to cover it up. When her psychopathic brother trashes his office, he lies to cover it up. This is the Idiot Plot Syndrome--at each move, the entire audience is cringing at the stupid mistake made by the protagonist, but each of these mistakes is essential to keep the story going, since doing the self-evidently right thing would clear up the mess and send the audience home.
Martin's childish lies eventually allow someone to frame him for murder. The cops allow an actor (Kevin Bacon), researching a role as a cop, to do the questioning. In a deus ex broken armrest, he escapes effortlessly, and immediately returns to his druggie sweetheart, even though the police are watching her.
In the end, the loving fiancée turns out to be the villainess, having hatched the whole plot in order to take ownership of his business. (A dentist office? Some motive.) She had talked his accountant into rearranging his corporate structure to make her plot possible, yet when his accountant, on the chair for some tooth drilling, began to spill the beans, it was he, not she, who insisted that the accountant shut up and submit to the nitrous oxide.
Her original idea had merely been to frame him for drug dealing, yet somehow she had had the amazing foresight to make a denture copy of his teeth, for the purpose of putting incriminating bite marks all over a dead body that only at the last moment intruded unexpectedly into her plan. In the end, she commits a second unnecessary murder, and is filmed in the act by an office video camera she knew all about. Martin, however, manages to fake his own death and abscond to France with his loser girlfriend (now miraculously cured of her addiction, and full of his child), even though it is now completely unnecessary that he run away.
I'll stop here, not because I can't think of any more flaws, but because it's pointless to do so. Maybe there's a decent Sherlock Holmes on the tube.