I’ve said it before on Epinions.com - I’m one who CAN love a really dumb, pointless movie. I gave high marks to movies like Austin Powers in Goldmember, Duece Bigalow: Male Gigolo and The Animal. These are all just really dumb, pointless movies: but all of them made me laugh like a drain. And it could be argued that Corky Romano is a really dumb, pointless movie. But it isn’t funny. Sometimes a film just tries too hard to be funny, and you end up getting a product like Men in Black II, Nothing to Loose or Corky Romano.
The movie’s setup is simple: the mob is in trouble, and they need a man to help set things straight. Their answer, send in the only man that isn’t tainted: dumb-a** Corky Romano (to quote Kurtwood Smith’s Red Foreman ;). And of course, all hilarity will ensue!
Unfortunately, all hilarity doesn’t really ensue. Oh, it tries to, but it just doesn’t get off the ground. The directing is uninspired, the pacing is off. The fish out of water scenario never builds into anything we can truly care about. Sure, it’s a mob family Corky comes from, but unlike DeNero’s character in Analyze This, we never really care about whether or not they succeed in getting away with the crime.
Overall, the casting is fine. Peter Falk does an enjoyable job as the head of the crime family; and Chris Penn is very funny pulling off his own DeNero of sorts, by playing off on his own more serious crime roles in films like Reservoir Dogs. And of course, it’s always cool to see the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree up on screen.
Chris Kattan also proves that he is very adept at playing the nutjob, and Corky Romano and the much more enjoyable film Undercover Brother both showcase his talent nicely. He’s almost like a dark-haired Steve Martin, and yet his own zaniness is trapped and just doesn’t work because movies like Corky Romano are really just uninspired.
The script isn’t particularly good, and all the scenes have been played before in much better movies. But I feel the movie really suffers from the film’s directing. The entire feel of the movie is haphazard at best, and a much more steady and upbeat pace would have done the film much better. Comedy is a difficult thing to direct and produce, and here, many scenes just play on too long and produce very few laughs.
Even the DVD’s own special feature about the development of a scene shows the actors huddling around a playback monitor after the scene has been shot, and there is a definite feeling that even they know the movie they’re making just sucks. It’s a poor DVD actually, they don’t even put the film’s own hilarious set of movie trailers on it. It’s too bad, because I have this strange feeling that Corky Romano could’ve been great. And what’s worse is at only 85 minutes, the film feels like it drags on long past three or four hours. In the end, it truly is time well wasted.
My Grade for this Movie: D
(Movie originally reviewed on October 31, 2002)