BEFORE: Well, as long as we're already out in the desert...
THE PLOT: Lauren and Sandy are total opposites who end up in the same acting class and who don't know they are sharing a lover. When he disappears under mysterious circumstances they search for him across several states and discover he had other interests as they find their lives in danger.
AFTER: This film is a strange step-child of the 80's. Time was, you could just take two different actors, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi, make up some secret-agent story, and figure that the movie would pretty much write itself.
This one features Bette Midler and Shelley Long - Long made an entire career out of playing upper-class twits after appearing as Diane Chambers on "Cheers". I see the attraction - when she first hit the scene on TV, who didn't want to defrost that ice queen? But by the late 80's the novelty had sort of worn off.
Here she plays Lauren, a New York actress whose goal is to play "Hamlet" - apparently she's never seen it done in the West Village... I think at NYU I saw every possible variation on "Hamlet", including 10 people playing "Hamlet" at a time - so a woman playing the part seems like no big deal. Long's upper class character ends up in an acting class with Bette Midler's Sandy, a downtown broad, and they inadvertently start dating the same man (Peter Coyote).
The man appears to die in an explosion, the acting class is more than it seems, the CIA chases them all the way to New Mexico, and the macguffin is some sort of stolen defoliant that could de-green California. This qualifies as a caper film since there's a team-up, a chase across the country, and a suitcase full of cash.
If you can take Robert Prosky as a KGB agent, then this might be an OK film for you. But he appears several times in the film in a number of very flimsy disguises, so it's not too hard to track him through the film. And Lauren's training in fencing and ballet comes in very handy in the final battle in the New Mexico desert - so the story is actually very well organized, but it's just not very intelligent or entertaining.
George Carlin is the standout, as a non-Indian tracker who acts very stoned...
And the film's title comes straight from "Hamlet" - as in "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" from the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. That's actually one of the most intelligent things about the whole film...
RATING: 4 out of 10 suitcases
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