Yeah, I know. It’s a fucking awful movie, but I remembered it for some reason as being not only 1) fairly funny in spots but 2) a lot better than people gave it credit for. It’s neither. Sally Field is actually quite good, but she’s wasted on the material, and the Hanks character is written so unevenly that you can’t care about him, because you don’t know which “him” you’re getting from scene to scene. And once again, I must object to incorrect Jersey-accent coaching; John Goodman sounds Alabaman for most of the movie. The primary issue, of course, is that you can’t do a triumph-over-adversity plot with comedy; it’s too subjective, and you have to splice in a bunch of wicked annoying reaction shots of audience members busting a gut, which is superfluous if the bit is actually funny and pathetically fake if it isn’t. If they’d cut all the stand-up out of the movie entirely and just done a day-in-the-life kind of thing, it could have worked, maybe, but probably not, and here’s why I say that — the slapstick sequence before the clients come to dinner. That kind of sequence is kind of cheap, but with a minimum of effort, it’s a slam-dunk; a little wacky music, a few quick cuts, your work is done. This one just lies there, stillborn. The music is wrong, the editing is behind by two beats, nobody on the screen is actually running…it’s everything that’s wrong with the movie.

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