Movie Night: Meet Wally Sparks.

Review #628: Meet Wally Sparks.

Cast
Rodney Dangerfield (Wally Sparks), Debi Mazar (Sandy), Michael Weatherly (Dean Sparks), David Ogden Stiers (Gov. Floyd Preston), Cindy Williams (Emily Preston), Burt Reynolds (Lenny), Lisa Thornhill (Priscilla Preston), and Eamonn Roche (Miller) Directed by Peter Baldwin.

Review
Misery sure loves company, doesn't it? This is a movie with a premise just made for Dangerfield...written by him as well (co-written, but whatever), in a film I'm sure not many remember...and for good reason. The movie feels really, really tired, a film that just flails around like a fish on a beach. Dangerfield does his usual one liners, which are fine, a shame that his character isn't really interesting. The main problem is the premise itself, it looks promising on paper, in the sense that it looks like an average movie that Dangerfield could make better (Oddly enough, the movie Ringmaster starring Jerry Springer would be released a year later, both movies marketed as comedies, about host of trash TV shows). The movie manages to be more boring than funny, like you're going through the motions. The gags feel old after about 30 minutes, and there's still 70 minutes to go, and then it turns into The Man Who Came to Dinner all of a sudden, it doesn't help the movie too much, though at least it reminds you to watch that film again. The characters are standard, though of all of them, I guess Stiers is the best character because any character who gets tired of the main character that isn't just the villain is fine with me. The movie flounders, sometimes trying to be trashy, and sometimes trying to be slapstick, and it garners some success, but not too much. At this point, you might as well watch Caddyshack instead, or Back to School, or Dangerfield's stand-up specials, those are much more interesting to watch, and not this misfire of a film.

Overall, I give it 3 out of 10 stars.