...featherweight fun, built around a clever idea and a uniformly good cast.
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Remember the old 1966 movie, "Fantastic Voyage," where a crew of scientists were miniaturized and implanted in the blood stream of a human body? Well, take that same scenario and insert a whole lot of humor, and you've got "Innerspace," the 1987 adventure-comedy starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, and Meg Ryan. It's a lightweight, silly affair, to be sure, but Quaid and Short make a good team, and the special effects people at Industrial Light and Magic have a field day. The result is an amusing if conditional romp.
Steven Spielberg co-produced the film, so we would expect the production values to be high, and Joe Dante ("Gremlins 1 & 2," "Matinee") directed, so we would expect the fantasy quotient to be high as well. We're not disappointed, although neither condition ensures the funniest movie possible, which is the only downside to an otherwise agreeable motion picture.
The film's two main attractions are (1) its Academy Award-winning special effects, which hold up quite well after more than a decade and a half and make the visuals of Short's innards worth watching; and (2) the wimpy Short's reactions to having a he-man inside him showing him how to be tough. The convoluted and entirely preposterous story line that gets Quaid inside Short is beside the point, of course; this is a comedy farce, after all, but I'll do my best to give you the basic setup.
You see, Quaid plays a maverick, hotshot Navy pilot, Lt. Tuck Pendleton, who delights in breaking the rules. When a Silicon Valley electronics company invents a method of drastically reducing people and things in size, they need somebody crazy enough to go along with an experiment in miniaturization. They want to put Tuck into a pod, a kind of one-man submarine, zap him in their machinery to make him and the pod tiny (I mean really tiny, like no bigger than a human blood cell), and then inject him into a laboratory rabbit. That's the plan, in any case. But things go wrong when some baddies get wind of the miniaturization process and try to steal it. In the complicated course of events, instead of Tuck getting injected into a rabbit, he gets mistakenly injected into a hypochondriac grocery clerk, Jack Putter, played by Short. Jack's only previous claim to fame in life is spending more than his salary on doctor bills for illnesses he doesn't have.
Well, Jack doesn't know what's happened to him, and it takes him a while before he accepts the idea that there's a tiny person floating around in him, communicating to him via radio and looking out of his eyes via a visual probe in his eyeball. At first, when he hears Tuck's voice inside him, he thinks he's either going nuts or he's possessed. Anyway, the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse chase between Jack and the baddies, who eventually realize the mistake that was made and need the pod that's in Jack. Jack usually manages to stay one step ahead of the bad guys, thanks to Tuck's guidance and encouragement. It's good to have friends on the inside, you know?
Along the way, Tuck enlists the aid of his sometimes girlfriend, a reporter named Lydia Maxwell, played by Meg Ryan, who almost gets lost in the shuffle but comes into her own about halfway through the film. "How do you know Tuck?" asks Lydia. "Well," replies Jack, "we're very close, actually." Also in the cast is Kevin McCarthy as the villainous Victor Scrimshaw, the head heavy in more ways than one. He looks, and even sounds, like a huge polar bear and appears to live in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Conservatory of Flowers.
Since the story is set in and around San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area, you would expect the City's famous hills to provide the backdrop for a few car chases. That has become almost mandatory since "Bullitt," so expect it here, too, although with not nearly as exciting consequences.
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[release]10474[/release]