Wrongfully Accused (Leslie Nielsen, Richard Crenna)
If you're ever flipping through the channels on a Saturday night and you have an hour and 45 minutes to kill, by all means do what I did last weekend and watch Leslie Nielsen's Wrongfully Accused. It's light. It's silly. It's a diversion. Don't look for many laughs though.
The film is a spoof of Harrison Ford's big hit The Fugitive. It tries to rank with the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker pictures, and I'll admit there are a few laughs here and there, but way too many scenes are almost embarrassing to watch. Nielsen, as the bumbling Ryan Harrison, is usually pitch perfect in his slapstick roles, but here you can literally see the moments where he derails or tunes out. There is a scene near the end of the movie when he gets out of a car with bad shocks that has been rocking back and forth violently, and the gag is supposed to be that when Nielsen gets out of the car, his character is still shaking and seizing about. It's a really painful moment.
There are a few of those, and a few badly timed jokes can ruin a comedy, no matter how many others hit the mark. I only saw the movie a few days ago, and already I can barely remember any of the movie, let alone any of the jokes.
Wrongfully Accused is written and directed by a first timer, Pat Proft. He/she never really lets the movie unwind at its own pace, Proft just lets it unravel altogether. That's a shame, because there is promise in a few set-ups, but the payoffs never really connect.
The best performance in the movie is the usually-dreadful Richard Crenna as the Tommy Lee Jones Capt. Gerard character. Or, perhaps it isn't his performance that's funny, maybe it's just that I'm so used to seeing Crenna in bad dramatic parts that I find it amusing to see him attempting comedy. The "love interest" this time around is Kelly LeBrock, who I believe was cast in the part because she is a woman in real life. Aaron Pearl plays the one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed man. In hindsight, Pearl probably feels like quite the one-brain celled actor for taking this part.
The movie ends with an unfunny lampoon of Titanic as we see LeBrock and Nielsen standing at the bow of the ship, then they unsuspectingly get hit by an overhead beam. If that scene had played at the start of the picture, at least the two leads could have opted to stay down for the count and wouldn't have had to be in this poor excuse of a movie.
