… is likely the guy who directed this.
Bill Murray is at his best when disgruntled, apathetic or just plain shit stirring.
Unfortunately in ‘The Man who knew too Little’ he is perpetually oblivious. With no-one to annoy and nothing to rail against he is just another gormless American wandering aimlessly along as all hell breaks loose around him. (And not a particularly funny one either.)
This is the entire ‘joke’ in the movie, and is revisited again and again, with each subsequent sequence becoming more aggravating and even less tolerable.
Consider the following:
Wallace Ritchie (Murray) heads to Great Britain to visit his younger brother Jimmy and family. Upon arriving unannounced Wallace is informed that Jimmy is holding a very important dinner party that night with special guests and dignitaries in attendance, ‘now is not a good time’. But don’t panic, because the latest fad of the nanosecond is occurring right down the road and is apparently the best thing ever…
Are you ready? The premise is that anyone can enter an interactive play simply by paying the application fee. The catch being that they are the only ones without a script, and are subsequently thrust into a thrilling scenario that unfolds as they ad-lib and adapt to lines fed by the other trained actors.
All that Wallace needs to do is answer a payphone when it rings at a certain time. He does this, and is told of a job involving foiling an assassination that very night.
Wallace answers the wrong call. Those instructions were not for him.
(Hilarious right? Well if you like that it just gets hilariouser.)
Wallace proceeds onward thinking that this is an elaborate and immensely enjoyable game. He rapidly learns he must attempt to stymie a callous group of men intent on returning the globe to ‘the glory days of international espionage’, when every country hated each other and assassinations and gun battles reigned supreme. Within minutes he meets a sexy young woman named Lori who initially wants to do him ill but rapidly realigns herself so that she might be on Team Wallace, and is pursued through the night by the vicious Boris the Butcher, among many other baddies. And all the while Wallace unwittingly acquits himself well, earning the respect and awe of the highly trained dangerous crims and lawmen.
The premise relies on universal stupidity that starts with Wallace not realising he is in real peril, then requires a laundry list of ‘people who should know better’ being equally inept and moronic. I could swallow one misunderstanding, say with brother Jimmy’s dinner party, but the police… the crims… the actors… the *ahem* Cossack dancers… the *gulp* geriatric S&M enthusiasts…
Actually I could swallow my pride and allow myself to enjoy things if only the joke was more than mistaken identity. Unfortunately this is not the case. Wallace wanders cluelessly outsmarting and remaining one step ahead of everyone without any plan and an amazing amount of dumb luck while everyone else looks on wide eyed, wondering just how he does it.
I’ll tell ya how he does it; by having a lazy scriptwriter and a film-making team as inept and useless as all those guys Wallace ‘outsmarts’.
I love Bill Murray. I hate The Man Who Knew Too Little.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. I hope this is the worst film Bill Murray has appeared in. I hope I never find out it isn’t.
