Clifford (1994)

I'll be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what to make of this movie. It is one of those things that is absolutely and completely baffling. And there are two things that make it more baffling to me than any movie has a right to be.

For one, this is supposed to be a comedy. That's how they classify it. And by they, I mean Orion Studios - the ones responsible for finally releasing this movie after...well, I'll get to that. But as far as comedies go, this is unique in the sense that it is not really all that inherently funny. And by funny, I mean that someone will laugh as they watch it. As you watch this, not only will you not laugh, you will deny that the concept of "humor" exists.

For another thing, it stars Martin Short. Martin Short is the funniest man on the planet and has proven it time and again in such worthy endeavors as TV's "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live" as well as classic films like Innerspace and Cross My Heart, two almost thoroughly underrated comedies. His gift for mimicry, sense for slapstick and earnest desire to entertain has been so obvious as to earn him many awards including an Emmy, a Tony and even the Sir Peter Ustinov Award at the 1999 BANFF Television Festival.

Why do I mention so much about Short? Because it is so inconceivable that a man as talented as he could have been in such an ungainly vehicle - apparently made just to showcase his talents. Okay okay, let me take a second to regroup so I can try and explain what went wrong here.

I'm back. The movie I'm going to dissect here is Clifford and, for obvious reasons, I'm going to be downright brutal on a man who should really know better than to have starred in it. As well as the director and the writers and the people who lingered in the background as the main actors did their thing. Just about EVERYONE is going to go down for this and it's not going to be pretty.

Ready? Good.

Here's the downward spiral of a plot: After nearly crashing an airliner full of people just so he can get the plane he's in to land, horrifically mischievous ten year-old Clifford Daniels (Short) demands that his harried parents take him to Dinosaur World, a place this dino-obsessed demon spawn would do anything to visit. Instead, they leave him at the airport to be picked up and babysat by his Uncle Martin (Charles Grodin), who takes the opportunity to prove to his girlfriend Sarah (Mary Steenbergen) that he is good with kids and would make a good husband. But in the matter of a few days, not only is Martin thoroughly horrified and frustrated at every turn with the burden of this bad seed, it seems that Clifford is determined on making Martin's life a living hell until he gets his way with things....

For as confusing as the action onscreen is to equate to any human notion of comedy, it is even more confusing as to what director Paul Flaherty must have thought was funny about the situation. At no time onscreen is anything made to be funny - this seriously plays more disturbing than your average horror movie about an unstable child terrorizing a family.

You want to know what writers Jay Dee Rock and Bobby Von Hayes wrote both before and after their work on concocting and scripting Clifford? Nothing. Not a thing. This proved to be such a disaster that couldn't even get a job writing a book about how NOT to write a Hollywood screenplay.

But I don't care if you'd cast your movie with Elijah Wood, Macaulay Culkin, Miko Hughes, Steve Urkel or any young lad with a modicum of talent - this would be the most wrong-headed, obtuse, self-defeating comedy ever to have the word "comedy" in its description and/or classification.

The only reason I ever went to a theater to see this thing was because it had Martin Short in it. And as I said before, he had been nothing less than wonderful in anything else I'd ever seen him in before. I mean, I even liked him in The Three Amigos!! So what went wrong here? He plays a demented, crazed dolt like no other, especially with that kind-of cross-eyed, possessed expression of his when he stares into the camera which comes close only to Fats the Ventriloquist Dummy in that 1978 movie Magic (which may not have been that scary movie but had one hell of frightening trailer).

But he doesn't even sound like a child; he only talks like Martin Short usually talks and without any child-like inflections...save for an occasional "bestest" this or "oh, yes" that. Every other time it's just Short dressed in what looks like a boys' school uniform, short pants, a red wig left over from the Alfred E. Newman collection and then just leave him standing in a hole when compared with other normal-sized adults. I expected him to pull out all the stops in this performance. after all, this was to have been a showpiece - all him - the chance to show the Oscar committee, the world and all his legions of fans that Martin Short was a comedic talent to be taken seriously.

Instead, he acts like Martin Short acting like a spoiled brat. You won't take him to Dinosaur World? He'll pour Tabasco Sauce in your Bloody Mary. Still won't take him to Dinosaur World? He'll fake you threatening a phoned-in bomb threat to city hall. Still won't take him to Dinosaur World? He'll destroy your giant working business model of the Los Angeles Freeway, wreck your house, ruin your relationship with your girlfriend, greatly diminish your social standing and quite literally ruin your life.

This is NOT the Martin Short I know and love. This is NOT the award-winning, funnest man on Earth I am familiar with. And this is certainly NOT the Martin Short I wanted to go and see in my neighborhood multiplex. I missed out seeing him in a theater for Innerspace; I didn't want to miss out on seeing him in a performance that would have seemed a can't-miss situation. Little did I know it would turn out to be a no-win situation instead.

Mary Steenbergen was once an award-winning talent herself. This is a woman who was in movies like Melvin and Howard and Cross Creek - someone for whom acting is effortless. Unfortunately it would appear a paycheck is a paycheck and in spite of her having only ONE split-second funny scene here with a cross-dresser, Steenbergen gets no opportunity to be anything else than "The Long-Suffering Girlfriend". You know what? She was the same thing in Back to the Future III and would later play "The Long-Suffering Wife" in the Will Ferrell vehicle Elf. Mary Steenbergen is way too talented and way too much of a presence to be anything less than "The Long-Suffering" whatever. It's just not fair to her or anybody else.

You know who else suffers here? Dabney Coleman as Uncle Martin's pompous boss. He wears a couple of toupees, effects a Texas twang and acts like Dabney Coleman, taking a moment later to try and take advantage of Mary Steenbergen in the back of a limousine. As far as I'm concerned, Dabney could get away with anything (anyone who's seen him on such TV shows as "Buffalo Bill" and "The Slap Maxwell Story" can attest to that fact. But as far as anyone who's seen him in movies like On Golden Pond, Tootsie, WarGames, and Cloak & Dagger will rightly wonder what kind of difference took place between the Eighties and the Nineties. He's the bringer of the smack-down, not the recipient. Haven't directors and screenwriters learned that? It's like seeing Don Rickles do his routine, only edited for the PG crowd. Depressing.

In fact, you know who the only one is to get out of this whole mess relatively unscathed?

The same man who got out of Ishtar unscathed.













Charles Grodin.

As the harried Uncle Martin, Grodin hits every tried-and-true mark in the Charles Grodin expression registry to underscore the fact that he is, in fact, babysitting Satan's Only Begotten Son. He grins, smirks, grimaces, groans, squints, growls, howls, flails, screams, bulges his eyes, pops his veins and quite literally melts down right there on the screen for all to see before exploding in a hail of psychotic revenge that the audience would more than love to re-enact on director Flaherty and writers Rock and Hayes. In actuality, this is more Grodin's movie than it is Short's, seeing as how it is his character that we will sympathize more than with Clifford.

Clifford is not a cute kid. He's Martin Short in a small boy's haircut and clothes. Clifford is not a mischievous tyke. He's a psychotic, vindictive little brat who deserves the taken behind the woodshed and thrashed with a willow switch. Multiple times. And Clifford is not in the Dennis the Menace-mold of children. He's in the Damien Thorn-mold (Omen II version).

Like I said, everything culminates when Damien...I mean, Clifford is literally kidnapped by Uncle Martin and dragged to Dinosaur World after hours and forced to ride the same roller coaster dinosaur ride over and over and over again, faster and faster each time until it literally collapses around him and threatens to kill him. And for as good a concept as that sounds, it does not play out as well or as funny or as psychotically-fulfilling as it could have been. It all just sort of unfolds before our eyes, like every other bit of odd business that unfolded before us in this film's 90-minute running time.

I can't say that I enjoyed Clifford. There were maybe a second or two that make me chuckle at the very most, but nothing else. I just sat there for the most part in stunned silence. Stunned that I found Clifford so unfunny. Stunned that I couldn't get any enjoyment out of watching so many talented people sharing the screen at the same time. Stunned that I felt so uncomfortable and so dismayed that anything purporting to be a comedy could be so unentertaining for such a long time.

Clifford is not a comedy. It is an endurance test that will make you feel as if you've lost a long-distance run through a mine field. It is a movie that wil give up on you long before the beginning credits even finish. This is a detriment to the good will built up over the years by Short, Grodin, Steenbergen and Coleman. Even any fans of Richard Kind will give this a pass, as they rightly should. And so should you.

Learn from my mistakes, kids; Clifford is the absolute largest floating chunk of failure ever perpetrated by Orion Pictures (besides RoboCop 3) and probably one of the biggest reasons it later went bankrupt - only an idiot would have paid to see this in a theater...yes, like me.

At least everyone else recovered and moved on from this thing. In fact, the only ones who didn't recover (thankfully) were the writers - Jay Dee Rock and Bobby Von Hayes. And the only reason I mention their names again is so that anyone in Hollywood who happens to be reading this review will remember their names as ones NOT to hire.

I read where someone over at efilmcritic.com said that Clifford was about as funny as The Holocaust. Myself, I think The Holocaust should sue Paul Flaherty for damages.

Clifford (1994) 2011-02-16T17:25:00-08:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: admin