BEFORE: Yet another comedy in which a regular guy gets caught up in international spy affairs, I think.
THE PLOT: A man picked randomly out of a crowd is made the target of CIA survelliance and pursuit.
AFTER: There's not much of the international scene depicted here, after a smuggling operation that takes place in Morocco - and it's really tough to see what relation that opening has to the rest of the film. Something goes wrong, and the Senate holds a hearing and...well, after that I found the plot hard to follow.
For some reason, one group of CIA spies needs to keep the other group occupied, so they pick an everyman out of an airport crowd and pretend he's their contact. One group of spies protects him and the other pursues him, and the CIA basically chases its own tail for the next 90 minutes of screen time.
The random guy is a violinist, played by Tom Hanks (last seen in "That Thing You Do!"), and he's mostly oblivious to the attacks, assassinations, and surveillance operations around him - thanks to a series of wacky misunderstandings that would put "Three's Company" to shame, and a lot of people getting hit on the head and falling unconscious, or hit with tranq darts, at inconvenient times.
Most of the gags fail to connect, or don't make any sense - why, for example, did the CIA see fit to reconfigure the plumbing in his apartment during their search? And then, later on, why did they seem to be unaware of having done that? The menacing dental-surgeon agent seems to be a reference to "Marathon Man", but why did he knowingly remove the teeth from the wrong person?
Plus, what's the big picture? There seem to be two rival factions in the CIA, but why? Who are they, and what do they each want? And how did Tom Hanks' career survive this drivel?
There is one original element, which perhaps prevents this slapstick farce from being as bad as "Radioland Murders" - Hanks' character doesn't know how to drive, so the standard spy-film car chase is instead replaced with a bicycle chase. Other than that, this film is a big waste of everyone's time.
Also starring Lori Singer (last seen in "The Falcon and the Snowman"), Dabney Coleman (last seen in "9 To 5"), Jim Belushi (last seen in "Jingle All the Way"), Charles Durning (last seen in "The Hudsucker Proxy"), Edward Herrmann, and Friends of the Show Carrie Fisher (today is the anniversary of her singing performance on the "Star Wars Holiday Special", BTW) and Tom Noonan (last seen in "Manhunter"). Cameos from David L. Lander and David Ogden Stiers (last seen in "The Majestic").
RATING: 2 out of 10 two-way mirrors
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