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Review: Not much to 'The Man Who Knew Too Little'
November 17, 1997
Web posted at: 10:04 a.m. EST (1504 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- I've had a long-standing theory that Bill Murray (a great comedian in the Groucho Marx tradition) is at his funniest when he refuses to act. Think about it. The humor in his best starring performances ("Stripes," "Ghostbusters," "Groundhog Day," and, unfortunately, not much of anything else) always stems from his eyeing the other actors like they're out of their minds. He just can't make himself believe all the hogwash that's taking place around him, though everybody else seems to. Continually pursing his lips and raising an eyebrow, you can see that Bill knows something that everyone else doesn't, and he's not about to let them in on the secret.
So what's "The Man Who Knew Too Little" about? Murray plays a guy who's continually giving a performance (as a secret agent) because he thinks he's tangled up in a kind of living-theater play and that all the other people around him are acting. What's actually going on is he's stumbled into a government assassination plot, and everyone he meets is a real-life spy. They all assume he's also the real thing -- a suave, sophisticated James Bond who yelps and giggles while they try to kill him because he has ice water in his veins.
In other words, the plot of "The Man Who Knew Too Little" focuses on what I consider to be the exact opposite of what's funny about Bill Murray. Everybody in the movie knows more than he does, so it's no fun to watch him make his co-stars look ridiculous.
Okay, it's a little bit of fun. The plot is so thin you feel like taking it out for a hamburger, but Murray manages to wring some decent laughs out of the painfully obvious material.
The movie takes place in London. Murray's character has flown there for his birthday to see his far more sophisticated brother (Peter Gallagher, who's a pretty sharp comedian himself, and doesn't look one single bit like "brother" Bill.) Gallagher, however, has an important business-related dinner party to attend to the evening that his dim-witted sibling unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep.
To get him out of the house, Gallagher buys Murray a ticket to a hot new audience-participation play. The cast members telephone the ticket-holder and embroil him in some crime-related high jinks, then the "plot" evolves according to the audience member's improvisation. (If any of this sounds the least bit believable, let me know.)
Murray's Wallace, being sweet but stupid, ends up answering the wrong phone call and spends the entire evening running and careening through London with a sexy woman (Joanne Whalley) who's been having an affair with the British Prime Minister. A bunch of spies are trying to get their hands on a batch of letters that Whalley wrote, but there's also a bomb set to go off at a formal diplomatic dinner. It really doesn't make any difference. The gist is that no matter how many car chases he gets into, no matter how often people try to torture him or shoot him, Murray just chuckles and keeps playing secret agent. This happens over and over again. It's shampoo, rinse, repeat, except with bad jokes instead of Prell.
Frankly, this whole thing sounds like something that might happen to Herman Munster, not a promising situation when you realize it'll take 90 minutes to play itself out. Murray is at his best, though, when he's just fooling around. Near the end, he ends up wearing traditional Russian garb and performing with several other acrobatic dancers before the dining government big-wigs. As you might expect, Murray has no idea how to do a Russian folk dance, so he has to ad-lib. The result is a combination polka and aerobics routine that had me in stitches. There are a couple other moments during the film when Murray steps out and does a little business before moving on to the next same-old-same-old joke, and they feel like a breath of fresh air when they occur. All in all, though, that's nowhere near enough oxygen to keep the movie's heart pumping.
Somebody put Bill Murray in a good movie before we have another Chevy Chase on our hands, a hellish thought if ever there was one.
"The Man Who Knew Too Little" is fine for kids. There's cartoonish violence, a few dirty words, and some sexual innuendoes, but that could also describe a junior high school locker room. Rated PG. 90 minutes.
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