Director: Leonard Nimoy (no, really)
Cast: Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson, Nancy Travis
Have I Seen It Before?: Yep!
Did I like it?: I would watch the three stars of this film do almost anything. Well, I’d watch Ted Danson do anything. I’d watch Tom Selleck do most things, besides guest star on Friends, which I just can’t anymore. I usually only get interested in Guttenberg if he’s paired with a wise-cracking robot.
At any rate, the film uses the amiable chemistry between the three leads to fuel its way through a heroin smuggling storyline that is completely and totally abandoned by the time the third act begins.
Goddamn, this movie is weird. And that’s before we even get to the ghost.
A long since debunked urban legend posits that just beyond the curtains in a scene with Danson, the specter of a young boy with a shot gun. Back in days when humanity had any sort of credulity left, the legend about the image grew to suggest that the set of the apartment shared by the titular men was occupied and quickly vacated by a family whose son had shot himself.
It’s a really dumb mystery because this fabled ghost is clearly a carboard of Danson himself. It’s not even kind of hard to figure it out. No wonder we as a society need snopes.com.
The much truer mystery is how Leonard Nimoy came to direct such an otherwise workmanlike comedy that is so much of its age. Did Disney read the script and say that the man behind Spock was the only one who could bring this story to life for an American audience? Why would Nimoy be interested in it? He had always expressed an interest in allowing actors mostly identified for the television roles to play against type, but there are very few parts of Jack Holden (Danson) that aren’t Sam Malone at their core, especially when we’ve been allowed to see the menagerie of weirdos that he has played in recent years. Maybe <Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)> was the most successful fish-out-of-water comedy in recent years, and the Mouse House was willing to ignore the spaceships and whales.
Either way, it boggles the mind, and regardless it speaks to Nimoy’s talents as director that he was able to pull off such a perfectly watchable film.