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Starring Leslie Nielsen, et al. Released to DVD on December 22, 1998. I honestly didn't want to like this movie. Having seen numerous previews for this latest Leslie Nielsen spoof trailered before the Lethal Weapon 4 and The Avengers screeners. I wasn't exactly feeling crazy about viewing another spoof that looked as if it were merely another vehicle to rip-off scenes from other more popular movies, ala Spy Hard. However, when I watched this film, I laughed in spite of myselfómy cheeks were red, and my belly shook like a bowl full of jelly.Spoof veteran Nielsen returns to the silver screen here playing the part of Ryan Harrison (read Dr. Richard Kimble) a concert violinist who has been wrongfully accused of murdering a friend. The truth of the matter is that an evil one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed man is framing Nielsen. En route to prison, Nielsen's bus hits a banana peel in the road and crashes, ultimately coming to rest on some nearby railroad tracks. After rescuing every prisoner and guard on board, Nielsen escapes into the forest, returns to his hometown, and begins looking to clear his name. Richard Crenna plays the gung-ho, balls-to-the-wall US marshal hell-bent on recapturing Nielsen. As it might seem, Wrongfully Accused's writer/director, Pat Proft, 'borrowed' a little of this material from Andrew Davis' 1993 release, The Fugitive. This was where Proft made his wisest decision while drafting the screenplay; he only took the plot structure for this material from one single film. Quite the opposite is the case with Mafia! Mafia! Writer/director Jim Abrahams didn't take plot points from just one film, he attempted a loftier goal of spoofing plot points from every film in the Mafia-gangster genre, ranging from Goodfellas to The Godfather trilogy, that ultimately caused the cohesive flow of his film to be damaged; it is very hard to follow a film that's script is traveling in four different directions at the very same time. Wrongfully Accused simply followed a standard three-act script. The biggest difference between Mafia! And Wrongfully Accused though came with the comic ideas behind the scripts. Proft, who also penned Police Academy and Bachelor Party, has a knack for creating humorous scenes and dialogue exchanges. To me, this is what true comedy is about: watching characters weave their ways in and out of humorous situations through the use of witty dialogue and observations. And while this serves as the focal point of Wrongfully Accused's script, Abrahams just glazed over this in Mafia!'s script in an effort to try and set up even more supposedly hilarious scenes that were just stupider recreations of previously viewed scenes. This isn't to say that Wrongfully Accused is without any of these scene recreations, but Proft keeps them to a relative minimum and doesn't allow for his movie to rapidly and unsettlingly take off in another direction just to have the opportunity to spoof a scene from another film. Wrongfully Accused isn't worthy of comparisons to the top spoofs of our time like Airplane or The Naked Gun films, but stands its own ground, on it's own two feet. Of the two recently released spoofs, Wrongfully Accused is the only choice. See this one. | |||||
