Are You With Us?: Showtime
By Ryan Mazie
March 12, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
With the plot built on misunderstandings, Robert DeNiro stars as a tough, asocial detective who lives for his job. Eddie Murphy plays a mediocre officer who wants to quit his day job and become an actor (the film is set in Los Angeles by the way so the celebrity cameos are obviously endless). After a news crew scanning the police radio botches an undercover bust, DeNiro shoots out the network’s camera. Now in debt to the TV station who is threatening to sue and with the LAPD in need of positive PR, the chief forces the hard-boiled DeNiro to star in a reality series where he is paired up with Murphy’s fast-talking rookie officer. Sounds realistic, right?
To be fair, the concept does not sound half bad for an airy comedy and Showtime (the title of the film comes from the title of the reality TV show, which is also Murphy’s catchphrase) starts off pretty decent. Unfortunately, the plot is stretched thin within 25 minutes, filling the remaining hour with non-sequiturs and montages. There is a scene where William Shatner strangely gives DeNiro acting lessons on how to dramatically raise an eyebrow. Granted, this is somewhat funny, but one of the many montages where DeNiro and Murphy are sitting in the video confessional booth is a black hole that lasts awkwardly long enough for me to start wondering why the hell am I still watching this mess?
Released this same frame in 2002, unlike this Friday’s competition-less buddy cop comedy, 21 Jump Street, Showtime came in third place, behind the first Ice Age (I just saw the trailer for this summer’s fourth installment of the series and was pleasantly surprised) and the first Resident Evil (who would have guessed a weekend in mid-March would spawn-off two major franchises?).
Opening to the tune of $15 million, Showtime was a flop, especially against the major $85 million budget for the non-summer comedy (my guess is that at least half of that went to the cast, which also includes Rene Russo as a brainless TV exec and Mos Def as an equally dunderheaded gangster).
With heavy competition and posionious word-of-mouth, Showtime never found its box office groove, barely scraping past the $38 million mark (about $52 million adjusted). Overseas revenue was surprisingly low, matching the domestic gross.
I enjoy Eddie Murphy pre-2000; however, he seems to have lost his touch (see this past weekend’s flop A Thousand Words) around the time of this film. Outside of Shrek, his leading man filmography after Showtime reads: Adventures of Pluto Nash, I, Spy, Haunted Mansion, Norbit, Meet Dave, and Imagine That. Yikes! Outside of a supporting part in Dreamgirls, Murphy’s career has been an unfocused mess of paycheck roles. Hopefully, one day he will exit family fare (Tower Heist this past November was a step in the right direction).
In Showtime, Murphy uses his greatest skill – his motor mouth, playing a character who cannot shut-up. However, his Homer Simpson-level of intelligence is frustrating. It is nice to see him verbally clashing with DeNiro, yet physically they seem friendly with one another – probably bonding together on-set over what they had gotten themselves into with this film.
DeNiro sleepwalks through his part, just delivering a caricature of his normal tough-as-nails typecast. Occasionally lightening up enough to chuckle, those are the scenes that make the movie click. Like Murphy, this was the start of DeNiro’s “paycheck” career phase as well, taking part in films like Godsend, Hide and Seek, and Killer Elite.
I believe that Showtime was a smart, tight comedy when it was greenlit by Warner Bros. However, credited with four separate writers (there were surely many more uncredited script doctors draining the comedic life out of the screenplay), it was dumbed-down into a slapdash “comedy," full of needless explosions and montages.
Surely directed by a committee of producers and studio heads, Tom Dey is credited as the helmer of Showtime. Dey fails to mix comedy and action as well as he did in his semi-hit previous film debut, Shanghai Noon. While cops are in car chases and come across grisly bodies, nothing about that feels natural here. The destructive, bullet-strewn car chase through Los Angeles is neither thrilling nor relevant to the story. Seemingly belonging to a different movie, there are quite a few aftermath continuity errors that go unnoticed by everyone in the film except the viewers.
When Russo’s character (I pray she got a nice paycheck for having to deliver some cringe-worthy lines) pitches the reality show to the head of the television network, he asks, “What is the prize?” Back in 2002, reality TV was all about gamesmanship. Following people around with a camera was not “reality TV” unless it involved a million dollar reward. Today, a show like Showtime actually seems more than realistic, making the film with us in terms of its plot more now then when it was released. Edtv, a smarter, and funnier film than Showtime, revolving around a fictional reality show, also flopped, with the concept being foreign at the time.
Dey never changes the camera style for the filming of the reality show, making the plot mechanism never fully work. I am sure if this film was made today, it would be all hand-held camera (something never employed here; instead we just see the cameraman filming what happens, serving as a distraction).
Worth seeing for the first 25 munutes (this is the type of movie you can guess the ending even of before you hit play), Showtime is all lights, camera, and explosive action, but lacks character, laughs, and plot. Periodically entertaining, you can spend your time just as well by watching any reality program on TV. At least that is free.
Verdict: With Us
4 out of 10