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Once
Upon a Crime
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Once Upon a Crime, a lavish, internationally-cast comedy produced by Dino De Laurentiis, is surprisingly good entertainment. Its recipe list is not necessarily promising: a script devised by many hands, a flimsy Agatha Christie-style whodunit structure, a large number of comic actors (including John Candy and Cybill Shepherd) encouraged to ham up the screwball slapstick, and a director (Eugene Levy) from the good old days of SCTV. But much of the film works well, primarily because Levy has generated some fine, comic chemistry between pairs of performers (especially Shepherd and Jim Belushi), and because the plot is a busy mosaic which never lingers for too long on a flat routine. Revisiting a long lost '50s genre – Americans abroad in an exotic, tourist locale – the film makes a virtue of its slate of clichés. Italian star Giancarlo Giannini (familiar from many Lina Wertmuller movies) does a wonderfully low-key turn as a beleaguered French cop. © Adrian Martin October 1993 |
