‘Gone Fishin’ Goes Overboard On Silliness
With Joe Pesci and Danny Glover as bait, Hollywood Pictures is trolling for dollars aboard a new comedy called “Gone Fishin’.” It’s a sinker.
This is a film that misses the boat right from the start through an improper mixture of fools. Effervescent comic chemistry normally bubbles out of the pairing of volatile opposites, typically a sensible straight man and a blithering idiot a la Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis.
Although Pesci and Glover can pass physically for a latter-day Mutt and Jeff, the characters they play in “Gone Fishin”’ are inhabited by the same personality, a moron’s.
In this energetic but tedious and ill-considered outing, Pesci and Glover play Joe and Gus, disaster-prone friends and obsessed fishermen since childhood, when Gus’ efforts to dispose of one of Joe’s early cigars touched off a conflagration followed by a 48-hour urban blackout.
By the time the attenuated prologue to “Gone Fishin”’ comes to a welcome end, 36 years have passed, and Joe and Gus are bidding their families adieu a few days before Thanksgiving and heading south for yet another of their misadventurous annual fishing trips.
They are scarcely beyond the Florida border en route to the Everglades when Joe’s automobile, a Barracuda, naturally, is stolen by a smooth-talking villain, Dekker Massey (Nick Brimble), who specializes in marrying, murdering and stealing from his wives.
In the chase that follows, Joe and Gus meet up with Rita (Rosanna Arquette), whose mother is a marriage and robbery victim, and her friend Angie (Lynn Whitfield). Joe and Gus also manage to lose their trailer and their boat, set a gas station ablaze, demolish a new boat and burn down an elegant resort, but not without retrieving the Barracuda.
Inside are a knife that will provide evidence to convict Massey and earn them a substantial reward and a map that will lead Joe and Gus to an attache case filled with a couple of million dollars in cash and jewelry taken by the killer from his prey.
Because Joe and Gus exist on a level of dimwittedness beyond the reach of even the most sensitive sonar, they manage to lose the knife and retrieve the loot only in time to surrender it to Massey. It is a further measure of the mediocrity of “Gone Fishin”’ that never once does it occur to its heroes to turn to the police.
Christopher Cain, the director, whose oeuvre stretches from “Young Guns” to “The Amazing Panda Adventure,” and the screenwriters, Jeffrey Abrams and Jill Mazursky Cody, fail even to exploit the possibilities of the ill-tempered alligator that awaits Joe and Gus in a cave in the swamps.
But maybe they’re saving that thrill for “Gone Fishin’ II.”
xxxx “Gone Fishin”’ Location: East Sprague, North Division and Coeur d’Alene cinemas Credits: Directed by Christopher Cain, starring Joe Pesci, Danny Glover, Rosanna Arquette, Lynn Whitfield, Willie Nelson and Nick Brimble Running time: 1:34 Rating: PG