I had this in my DVR queue for eight months, and finally talked my wife into watching it. It had its moments, but I kept waiting for it to get good. It was like Grumpy Old Men, minus the laughs. From the look of it, I'm not going to get a lot of support, but I am really blown away that this could be more than a 60 or 70. This is a 2 1/2-star movie at best.
shareFeh! You're all wrong. This film deserves a 100 on 'Rotten Tomatoes'!
shareThis is not available often so enjoy it while you can. It's a classic. Any words with a K-sound are funny.
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Oddly enough, the best performance in the film is from Richard Benjamin. He was appropriately exasperated and annoyed by all the bickering. I became irritated with Matthau's schtick about as quickly as he did, and it's all on the same note for the rest of the movie. Of course, Matthau and Burns only get to behave like absent-minded men in the early stages of dementia when it's comically convenient for them to be that way, but in ordinary moments they're sharp and witty. Pure contrivance. Matthau is miscast in a role that should have been played by someone much older, and his performance is aggressively sentimental. In his best work, he abhors that kind of stuff. Here, he tries much too hard to give us a wily, adorable codger. He never seems like a real person coming mentally unwound in old age, just a writer's concoction. And I don't know why Neil Simon seems to think that having two actors shouting tame obscenities at each other for an hour is the same thing as having them be funny.
Dialogue like:
"How the hell did you get here?"
"I took a car."
"You just told me you can't drive!"
"I didn't, my daughter drove me."
"You have a daughter? What's her name?"
"I just told you her name."
"Whose name?"
etc, etc, zzzzzzzzzzzzz. One aggravating moment piled on top of another.
Watching it now for the first time, and unfortunately I agree. It has a certain staccato I can tolerate, with some memorable one-liners, and Matthau put a lot into this performance. But it's too much. He's too annoying. A little bit goes a long way, if it's even your cup of tea, and if it isn't, it's shrill for most of the runtime.
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