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A Buena Vista release. Written by Larry Doyle; directed by Danny DeVito; starring Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore and Eileen Essel. Released to DVD on March 2, 2004.  One of the more simple pleasures in life is an afternoon nap under a warm quilt in a cool room. Not only is there nothing wrong with taking naps during the day, napping is often a beneficial activity. This didn’t stop screenwriter Larry Doyle from attacking this quiet refuge with a vengeance in his script for Duplex. On its own, this particular recurring joke might not bear mentioning. However it quickly becomes a point of contention with Duplex because large portions of the film’s supposed humor come from ‘jokes’ like these. Rather than find material that is actually funny or work to create situations and scenes that are clever and witty, Doyle and director Danny DeVito have chosen to (attempt to) generate emotion and laughter from material that doesn’t offer any. And this goes a long way towards explaining why Duplex fails as it does. Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore star in Duplex as newlyweds Alex and Nancy. Tiring of the New York renter’s market, the couple is looking to buy a place of their own and they are surprised to find a stunning duplex in Brooklyn with fireplaces, space and stained glass galore in their price range. There is a catch, of course, to their great purchase though: the tenant from hell, 83-year old Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essel), lives on the second floor. Unable to take her incessant pestering, loud TV and affinity for watching them during their more intimate moments, Alex and Nancy decide to do the only sane thing: they start trying to kill Mrs. Connelly. Over the course of the last fifteen years, DeVito has practically cornered the market on dark, twisted romantic comedies having previously directed The War of the Roses, Throw Momma From the Train and the extremely underrated Death to Smoochy. With this in mind, it came as something of a surprise that Duplex was so very underwhelming. Absent the usual DeVito bite and black humor–save for one very amusing scene of Stiller attempting to get the flu in order to pass it on to his upstairs neighbor–and featuring large numbers of scenes predicated around their awkwardness, I began to realize that Duplex is less a DeVito film than it is a Stiller movie. And an unfunny Stiller movie at that. Duplex never gets off the ground. Featuring two unlikable leads in Alex and Nancy (they’re trying to kill an old woman in order to turn her apartment into a dining nook!), and a rather sympathetic antagonist in Mrs. Connelly, Doyle’s script is flawed from the get go. How can anyone root for two self-centered, poorly developed characters to whack the one bright spot on screen? This is a conglomeration of ‘supposed to’s’ and ‘might have been’ comic moments with one or two genuinely humorous bits thrown in. Just about everyone involved with Duplex should have known better than to follow through on this project.
jackson casey yes, it's true: Christian Bale wasn't the only current Hollywood actor to have gotten his start in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. Ben Stiller had a small role in the film too as a character named "Dainty". |
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