New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Got all that? Good. Now forget everything I just said because the story is actually the least innovative thing about this movie. My love of heist films is well documented but that's not what this is. A Fish Called Wanda is a romantic comedy and the title is not necessarily referring to the fish, nor are the stakes limited to a mere $20 million worth of jewels. The best part is that when Cleese and director Charles Crichton sat down to write this thing, it was apparently decided that the implausible nature of most rom-coms was not sufficient for this film, and that the words “over the top” were officially meaningless. Additionally, each actor would be required to provide a suicidal level of commitment to their character, each becoming a key component of the comic adhesive that holds all this insanely layered shtick together.

Curtis once made a career out of playing snarky sirens who are secretly the smartest person in the movie, and Wanda Gershwitz is no exception. Cleese excels at playing uptight, sentimental buffoons and this time, it really feels like he put his heart into it. Michael Palin has the unenviable task of playing the “straight" man here, with Ken's verbal tics and love of animals establishing him as the film's (rather tenuous) moral center. But the Oscar (literally) goes to Kevin Kline's completely demented portrayal of Otto - a jingoistic, pathologically violent sex maniac who loathes the British almost as much as he loves ninjas and hates people with disabilities. In the hands of someone like Gary Oldman, this would be a terrifying character, But Kline endows him with such comical excess of psychotic machismo that by the middle of the film, you’ll start laughing before he even does anything.

Everyone is having so much fun being in character and riffing off one another, you’ll probably forget the story details and end up absorbed with trying to guess how long it'll be until Otto sniffs his armpits again. This is, without a doubt, one of the funniest films of the last 30 years. To those of you who have yet to see it, I can confirm the legend as true. But of course, what YOU really want to know is...

Did the missus like it?

Well off course she did, because anyone who doesn’t like A Fish Called Wanda is obviously with the terrorists. In fact, the single criticism I can level is that while the movie is still very funny, the humor doesn’t feel as uniformly sharp as it did the last time I saw it. But this might be because I’ve seen it (now slightly more than) a dozen times, and because so many other comedies have since emulated this type of semi self conscious, improvisational mania. So, basically the only thing wrong with this film is that it positively influenced cinema in ways that still persist. This is why (freedom loving) people who’ve seen it love it - even if they don’t remember it - and people who haven’t seen it often pretend to remember it anyway. And now that I know my girlfriend likes it as much as I do, I feel a lot more comfortable turning my back on her.

My friends, that’s just the kind of bringing-people-together magic that makes guys like me love movies.

Continued:       1       2