Johnny Dangerously is less a movie and more an exercise in grave robbing. It's an Airplane! style spoof of 1930s gangster films
which is the whole problem in a nutshell. Airplane! was a parody of the airport disaster movies that had come out and been popular in the previous decade. Johnny Dangerously is parodying films that came out 50 freakin' years before this one was made. The result is a lifeless concoction that's weighed down even further by possibly the worst performance in Michael Keaton's career.
Johnny Kelly (Keaton) is a good-hearted man forced into the life of a gangster in order to pay for his sick mother's operations, only to find himself challenged on one side by a rival criminal and on the other side by Johnny's younger brother, who grew up to be a crusading district attorney. Now, there's nothing inherently funny about that plot, much like there's nothing inherently funny about an airplane crash, so the humor has to come entirely from two things.
1. Mocking the clichés seen in other stories about the same thing. 2. Random bits of absurd nonsense.
The problem is that this film is making fun of clichés that are half a century old, which is like kicking an old lady's walker out from under her. For a spoof to work, the audience has to remember and care about the thing being spoofed. With Johnny Dangerously, you can forget about the audience. The people who made this movie couldn't have remembered or cared about what they were spoofing because they were movies made before the vast majority of this cast and crew were even born. The forced and phony result is what you get when people try and tell a joke they don't really understand.
The random bits of nonsense are a little better, but they're still 2 or 3 steps down from the inspired lunacy of Airplane! and they can't escape the stale and labored smell that pervades the whole production. Basically, the funniest thing in this motion picture is looking at how hard the hair dressers had to work to disguise Keaton's receding hairline with this poufy construction hovering above his forehead.
The star of the show doesn't help matters by doing a hammy impersonation of a 1930s movie gangster instead of, you know, acting and stuff. In fact, Maureen Stapleton as Johnny's mom is pretty much the only person here giving a legitimate performance. Everybody else is vamping it up like they're doing a sketch on Saturday Night Live, which one failed SNL film after another has proved you can't get away with for 90 minutes.
If you've just finished a marathon viewing of 1930s gangster flicks, you might find Johnny Dangerously passably entertaining. Other than that, you'll just be shrugging your shoulders at it all the way through.
Johnny Kelly (Keaton) is a good-hearted man forced into the life of a gangster in order to pay for his sick mother's operations, only to find himself challenged on one side by a rival criminal and on the other side by Johnny's younger brother, who grew up to be a crusading district attorney. Now, there's nothing inherently funny about that plot, much like there's nothing inherently funny about an airplane crash, so the humor has to come entirely from two things.
1. Mocking the clichés seen in other stories about the same thing. 2. Random bits of absurd nonsense.
The problem is that this film is making fun of clichés that are half a century old, which is like kicking an old lady's walker out from under her. For a spoof to work, the audience has to remember and care about the thing being spoofed. With Johnny Dangerously, you can forget about the audience. The people who made this movie couldn't have remembered or cared about what they were spoofing because they were movies made before the vast majority of this cast and crew were even born. The forced and phony result is what you get when people try and tell a joke they don't really understand.
The random bits of nonsense are a little better, but they're still 2 or 3 steps down from the inspired lunacy of Airplane! and they can't escape the stale and labored smell that pervades the whole production. Basically, the funniest thing in this motion picture is looking at how hard the hair dressers had to work to disguise Keaton's receding hairline with this poufy construction hovering above his forehead.
The star of the show doesn't help matters by doing a hammy impersonation of a 1930s movie gangster instead of, you know, acting and stuff. In fact, Maureen Stapleton as Johnny's mom is pretty much the only person here giving a legitimate performance. Everybody else is vamping it up like they're doing a sketch on Saturday Night Live, which one failed SNL film after another has proved you can't get away with for 90 minutes.
If you've just finished a marathon viewing of 1930s gangster flicks, you might find Johnny Dangerously passably entertaining. Other than that, you'll just be shrugging your shoulders at it all the way through.