In-Laws (DVD)

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In 1979 Peter Falk and Alan Arkin starred in "The In-Laws," one of the funniest mismatched buddy pictures ever made, an absurdist, lunatic comedy adventure. Just why Warner Bros. felt the need to remake the film in 2003, heaven only knows.

It isn't that the new film is bad; it's just that it suffers mightily by comparison to the original, leaving one with the feeling that the newcomer is a lot worse than it is. In fact, the new "In-Laws" is not the kind of comedy that insults your intelligence or your moral conscience, nor is it the kind of film you want to throw a shoe at. It's simply a mediocre comedy, one where the gags generally fall flat, leaving you with a tedious ninety-eight minutes of viewing that feels a lot longer.

The one thing the filmmakers needed to do to make "The In-Laws" at least tolerable, not to say comparable to the original, was to cast its two leads properly. Certainly, on paper the actors seemed right: Michael Douglas as the daring CIA spy and Albert Brooks as the ultraconservative doctor. But, as you might guess, neither their spirit nor delivery are in the same league as Falk and Arkin. Would I have felt differently had I not seen and loved the original? I don't know.

Let me stop and explain what it's all about. Douglas plays Steve Tobias, a dashing secret agent who has spent the last quarter century chasing around saving the world while pretty much neglecting his son, now a lawyer and about to be married. Brooks plays Jerry Peyser, a compulsive, neurotic, buttoned-down podiatrist, whose daughter is about to marry Tobias's son. This odd couple of middle-aged gentlemen are about to become in-laws, but not before Tobias inadvertently leads Peyser through an adventure caper that leaves both of them changed forever.

Two problems: The gags that seemed so fresh and funny in the original seem lukewarm or lame in the new production; and, worse, the two stars are far less persuasive than their earlier counterparts. Falk was a manic loose cannon, a fellow we could easily accept as a "rogue agent" (as he's described later in the picture). Douglas is more a cool, flippant, easygoing, devil-may-care spy whose behavior isn't nearly so outrageous as it should have been to be funny. Brooks comes off a little better, but he, too, while being appropriately uptight, isn't as hilariously rattled as Arkin was in the earlier film. Arkin was on the verge of hysteria most of the time; Brooks seems only mildly annoyed.

Anyway, Douglas's character is in the midst of cracking a big case involving the sale of a nuclear submarine to a French gangster when his son's marriage interrupts his international schedule. He does his best to be socially acceptable to his prospective in-laws, introducing himself as a Xerox salesman, but he winds up getting Brooks's character involuntarily mixed up in his schemes, and before long the pair are being chased and shot at and confronting the usual mischief of a comedy action-adventure.

There's a funny bit with the podiatrist in the back seat of an FBI car as he's being "rescued" by Douglas, but it's one of the few genuinely humorous parts of the story. David Suchet (TV's Hercule Poirot) plays the gangster villain, Jean-Pierre Thibodoux, a chap who's trying to contain his impulsive homicidal tendencies by reading Deepak Chopra, and now he's much more relaxed and centered. He hasn't murdered anyone in weeks. He's so relaxed, in fact, when he meets Jerry, he falls in love. This gay angle is obviously a cheap shot, but it's largely innocuous, empty and harmless like everything else about the picture.