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Directed by Dennie Gordon; written by Emily Fox; starring Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Eugene Levy, Andy Richter. Released to DVD on August 17, 2004.  Okay, okay, we get it. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are eighteen now, they are no longer little girls. It's finally okay for them to be sex symbols. But does this fact have to be spelled out at every turn in New York Minute? The first scene of the film shows Ashley in a dream sequence in which she is naked. Oh, calm down! The movie is rated PG, so you're going to have to wait for the inevitable Playboy spreads that will arrive in a few years. Ashley is discreetly hidden by a stage's podium, but then, just ten minutes later, we see her getting into the shower. Again, bare shoulders are all we see, but was this shot really necessary? Well, of course not. To ask if any element of this film was necessary would open up a can of worms, considering the nakedness of its intent – that is, to be a vehicle for the Olsens that will transport them into grown-up, feature film-starring ingenues.
New York Minute is extremely pointless, unless you are an Olsen twin devotee – in the form of a preteen girl or an adult male (there are thousands of websites out there attesting to the Olsens' adult male following). Energetic comedic turns from Andy Richter (a limo driver connected to Chinese organized crime, sporting a very fake Chinese accent) and Eugene Levy (a bungling truancy officer who thinks nabbing Mary-Kate will finally make him a real cop) begin to redeem this boring, silly ninety minutes of product placement (the product being the Olsens themselves). Darrell Hammond (“SNL”) and Jack Osborne (Ozzy's son) also appear in various capacities, but both are terrible actors and wholly uninteresting in this film.
A plot synopsis will not be necessary for New York Minute. Within the opening scenes of this film, any moviegoer over the age of thirteen will know how it is going to play out. The once-estranged twins run around New York City (including a stop in Harlem at the “House of Bling” where they try on flashy, J.Lo-type clothes in a strained montage in which they look wholly out of place with the beauty shop's inhabitants). The twins become involved in a series of contrived mishaps, in which they mysteriously emerge wearing fresh make-up and trendy clothes, meeting “cute boys” along the way, and reuniting in the end as friends instead of enemies. Yeah, yeah, you've seen this all before. Almost every mishap in this film was stolen from another film. It contains elements of The Parent Trap, Lindsey Lohan's Freaky Friday, 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You and others. One wonders why Richter and Levy would put their names to this film, although both try endlessly to make the most out of their roles. They appear to succeed in having fun and are very watchable, but cannot redeem the type of film that would contain ten minutes of footage in which the Olsens are running around Manhattan, one in a too-short hotel robe and one in only a towel, for reasons that are too boring and insignificant to discuss. This scantily clad sequence embodies the purpose of this film to a tee.
If these girls had pouted their lips one more time in New York Minute in an attempt at cuteness and youthful sensuality, I was going to have to throw something at the screen. Sufficed to say, this movie is bad. Unfortunately, it is not so bad that it is good. And that would have been New York Minute's only saving grace.
EMILY RIEMER yes, it's true: Bob Saget, the Olsens' father on TV's "Full House" (1987), has a cameo in this movie. The girls run by him on a New York street and he looks at them confused, as if he knows them but cannot remember their names. |
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