Lookin' to Get Out (DVD)

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Critics were not kind to director Hal Ashby's 1982 comedy "Lookin' to Get Out," and that's putting it mildly. Some called it a turkey, others a bomb. The thing is, Ashby never had final cut on the movie, leaving it in the hands of the studio and others to edit almost twenty minutes from his version. The result appears to have been a disaster, although, to be fair, I never saw the movie. Anyway, twenty-seven years after the film's release, Ashby's original edit of the film turned up in the UCLA archives, excised material and all (Ashby had donated it to the school before he died), the Ashby edit having never been seen by anyone outside of Ashby and the editors until now.

The question, of course, is whether Ashby's version (called the "Extended Edition" or the "Director's Cut") is really any better than the theatrical version, something, as I said, I couldn't tell you, having never watched the theatrical version. However, judging just by what I see in this newly discovered edition, while it is certainly no turkey or bomb, it's still far from the world's funniest or most-engaging motion picture.

Apparently, Ashby made a cryptic remark about the film several years after its release, saying it was a lot better than people thought. One assumes he was referring to his own cut of the film and not the edited theatrical release. He died in 1988 and never had a chance to do anything further with the film himself. Jon Voight, who helped co-write and develop the original movie, said about the newly found version, "For various reasons, the film we released didn't really represent Hal's best work. I knew every version of the script and every cut, so I was understandably excited when I heard about this, yet I also didn't want to be disappointed. But when I saw it, I knew instantly it had Hal's touch.... When Hal Ashby (an Oscar-winning editor) cut his films himself, it was magic." One can understand this line of reasoning, considering that Ashby made some distinguished pictures, like "Harold and Maude," "Shampoo," "The Last Detail," "Bound for Glory," "Coming Home," and "Being There." It's just that "Lookin' to Get Out" is not in the same league as Ashby's better films. Put it this way: If "Being There" is the NFL, then "Lookin' to Get Out" is Pop Warner.

It appears that what Ashby, co-writers Al Schwartz and Jon Voight, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and composer Johnny Mandel were trying to make was a sort of zany, screwball-type comedy, and certainly one can see the potential there. Unfortunately, the direction falls flat, the script is implausible even by the whimsical standards of screwball comedy, and the acting is either forced and unnatural or disinterested and dull.

The plot involves the hijinks of a fast-talking, happy-go-lucky, compulsive gambler named Alex Kovac (Voight). At the beginning of the story, he has just won $6,000, which he promptly loses in a poker game to a hood named Harry (Jude Farese), along with another $10,000 that he doesn't have. Harry and his pal Joey (Allen Keller) give Alex until the next day to come up with the ten grand, or else. What Alex does is skip town and head for Vegas, dragging his poor-schmuck best friend Jerry (Burt Young) along with him, with the hoods in hot pursuit.

In Vegas, Alex and Jerry finagle their way into the best suite, the "Doctor Zhivago Suite," of a luxury hotel-casino, and from there they proceed to hustle up the ten big ones. Along the way, Alex meets an old flame, Patti Warner (Ann-Margret), Patti's five-year-old daughter, Tosh (Angelina Jolie in her film debut), an old gambler friend, Smitty (Bert Remsen), and the owner of the hotel-casino, Bernie Gold (Richard Bradford).

So, what goes wrong with the movie that makes it little more than run-of-the-mill? Ashby's comedies were usually low-key affairs. Here, he's unrestrained and often frenetic. People run amuck in all directions, at one point literally chasing around the hotel as though in a Keystone Kops caper. It isn't funny, just tiring. Worse, the script never develops any of the characters well enough for the viewer to care about them. They are all of them, to the person, unsympathetic, with the lead character, Alex, the biggest loser of all. The screenplay never shows him as anything but a selfish, conniving, manipulative scoundrel who listens to no one but his own inner voice, which is always wrong. Moreover, the only thing Wexler gets to photograph is the inside of a hotel-casino (the MGM Grand), and Mandell's music sounds like almost all the rest of those generic jazzy scores of the '70s and early '80s.