If the words uproarious, hilarious, or sidesplitting mean anything to you, this is your picture.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
How can you resist a film that has Michael Palin running over Kevin Kline with a steamroller after Kline has eaten Palin´s favorite tropical fish!
Directed by Charles Crichton, veteran of the Ealing Studio comedies of the fifties ("The Lavender Hill Mob"), and written by and starring John Cleese of Monty Python fame, "A Fish Called Wanda" is among the funniest movies of the past twenty years. If the words uproarious, hilarious, or sidesplitting mean anything to you, this is your picture.
Jamie Lee Curtis, Kline, Palin, and Tom Georgeson play a gang of jewel thieves who rob a bank of millions in diamonds. They stash the loot in a safe, but Georgeson secretly takes it out and puts it in a depository of his own. Then he promptly gets arrested, turned in by Curtis and Kline, who planned to take the money themselves and run. They are understandably upset when they find out their partner double-crossed them before they had a chance to complete their double cross of him!
Now the question is, where did Georgeson put the diamonds? Georgeson´s attorney is John Cleese. Maybe he knows. Curtis romances Cleese in an attempt to find out. The greed become catchy as all the crooks begin to think only of themselves.
The plot is tricky and fun, to be sure, but it´s the characters who are at the heart of the picture. Cleese plays Archie Leach, a variation on his Basil Fawlty role in "Fawlty Towers," one of the funniest TV shows ever made. Leach is a stiff-upper-lipped English barrister who is not above a little avarice and hanky panky. Cleese said he chose the name Archie Leach because it was Cary Grant´s real name and that was about as close as he would ever get to being Cary Grant on screen.
Playing Wanda, Jamie Lee Curtis was never funnier or sexier, the smartest one of the group. She is as clever as she is beautiful. But more to the point, she is, as I say, funny. Going from "Halloween" to "Wanda," the actress shows us she can cover the ground.
Nevertheless, Kevin Kline pretty much steals the show (and a 1988 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) as Otto, an ex-CIA operative who reads Nietzche. But he´s so stupid ("Don´t call me stupid"), he thinks Aristotle was Belgian, that the central message of Buddhism is every man for himself, and that the London underground is a political movement. When Wanda calls him an ape, Otto replies that apes don´t read philosophy. "Yes, they do, Otto," she says. "They just don´t understand it."
Average user rating (1-5):
Not yet rated.
Not yet rated.
[release]1541[/release]