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A remake that makes the original look good

By A.O. SCOTT
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Aug 08, 2003, Page 20

Originality is not usually something you expect from a remake. But in a field that includes such pointless recent updates of not-quite-classic older movies as Bedazzled, Sweet November and The Truth About Charlie, The In-Laws stands out. Not for its freshness or novelty, mind you, but for its utter, nearly systematic lack of imagination. It's as if the director, Andrew Fleming, and the screenwriters, Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, set out to make a movie that would be mediocre in every respect. If so, they have completely succeeded.

Even the music is lifted from other, better movies. A noisy chase sequence early on is accompanied by Paul McCartney singing Live and Let Die. Later a wedding-day washout unspools over Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, by which time your eyes may indeed be turning red, with boredom and irritation.

These selections are too feeble and obvious to qualify as neat pop-culture allusions, any more than the appearance of KC and the Sunshine Band constitutes a knowing wink at 1970s disco. The intention seems to be to comfort audiences by giving them nothing they haven't seen before or nothing they would object to dozing in front of after the meal on a transcontinental flight.

Michael Douglas, left, and Albert Brooks go through the motions of comedy. PHOTOS: FOX

This goes for the jokes as well, which turn on such moldy comic apercus as the weirdness of Asian cuisine (a whole stuffed python is served at a Vietnamese restaurant) and the existence of homosexuality, especially in prison. Since this is a wedding movie, there is also the obligatory drunken, sexually indiscreet bridesmaid and the crackpot spiritualist ex-wife (Candice Bergen), who shows up at the big event with a Buddhist monk in tow.

Film Notes: The In-Laws Directed by: Andrew Fleming With the Voice of: Michael Douglas (Steve Tobias), Albert Brooks (Jerry Peyser), Robin Tunney (Angela Harris), Ryan Reynolds (Marc Tobias), Candice Bergen (judy Tobias), and Lindsay Sloane (Melissa)

Bergen plays a New Age variation on the brittle upper-crustiness that has been her stock in trade of late. Her role though is very much an afterthought. The prospective newlyweds, Melissa and Marc (Lindsay Sloane and Ryan Reynolds), are as cute as a pair of puppies, but they are similarly marginal to the picture's main concern, which is the oil-and-water odd couple formed by their dads, a neurotic podiatrist and an erratic CIA operative.

These roles, originated by Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in Arthur Hiller's 1979 movie of the same name, are played here by Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. Brooks is Jerry Peyser, the podiatrist, for whom obsessive worry is less a personality trait than a worldview. His first meeting with Steve Tobias (Douglas) goes badly awry over that stuffed snake, and various international-espionage types converge on the two dads in the men's room. Before long Steve has dragged Jerry to France (via Barbra Streisand's private jet, though without Streisand), where they meet a mincing arms dealer whose foot fetish blossoms into a wild crush on Jerry.

Some amusing bits are stuffed into the hectic plot, which involves the coincidence of petty domestic crises with the potential sale of a stray Russian nuclear submarine (bound ultimately for Lake Michigan). Most of them arrive courtesy of Brooks, who appears at one point wearing a red thong bathing suit. Apart from that, his slow sputtering takes and his incomparable ability to slide from stricken anxiety to full-blown panic are reliably enjoyable, and he at least tries to make a character out of the bundle of tics and one-liners the script has given him.

The same cannot be said of Douglas, whose lack of conviction is, in the end, more suitable to the drab, dutiful spirit of the movie. He never gives more than what is minimally required to any scene, whether it calls for macho bluster or choked-up parental contrition. The original was no masterpiece, but at least Falk, with his loopy, scruffy intensity, gave the character (then named Vincent Ricardo) a hint of soulfulness and made the improbability of such a guy being entrusted with government secrets part of the joke.

Hiller's In-Laws was silly, but in an idiosyncratic way that makes it worth catching when it shows up on cable. That is the new version's destination, too, of course, and it will lose nothing in the transition to the small screen, since it is shot with all the action safely in the center of the frame, and designed to be forgotten in plenty of time for the next remake.
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