BEFORE: Mark Dacascos carries over from "John Wick: Chapter 3: Parabellum", and if you don't know who that is, you're clearly not a fan of modern-day martial arts movies. But if he does look SORT OF familiar to you, maybe you've seen him on the re-booted "Hawaii Five-O" series - but I'll always know him best as "The Chairman" on many episodes of "Iron Chef America". They tried it first with William Shatner as The Chairman (true story!) but nobody was buying it, because everybody knew who Shatner was. They needed somebody way under the radar, who people might believe was an eccentric Asian billionaire who would finance a ludicrous idea such as Kitchen Stadium, a place for chefs to wage culinary battles with mystery ingredients. Supposedly he was the nephew of the original Chairman Kaga, from the old Japanese "Iron Chef", but clearly they're not related, and anyway we found out years ago that guy was just an actor, too, he'd starred in the Japanese stage versions of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "West Side Story". Man, that broke our hearts, back in 1999. I suppose there's no Hattori Nutrition College, either, what a bummer.
THE PLOT: An amnesiac wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead FBI agent and $250,000. Is the sexy lady in the lobby his wife? Is he a spy or a janitor?
AFTER: Well, this past week's films have focused on the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the L.A. County Sheriff's office, bank robbers, mobsters, hitmen, and the Alabama legal system. Let's call that a very loose theme under the "crime" heading, and finish it all off with a comedy about a guy who THINKS he's an FBI agent (though there are some real agents in the film later on) but is really suffering from a case of "movie amnesia". No, that's not when you WISH you could forget about a bad movie you just watched, it's when a character gets a head injury and can't remember who they are, like in the "Overboard" movies.
Of course, there are rules to "movie amnesia", and they have nothing to do with the way that amnesia or head injuries work in real life. In movies people claim to forget everything, but yet somehow they remember to do basic human functions or repetitive learned tasks. The "doctor" character sort of explains it all here, and makes further false claims like "his memory will come back in three to five days" and "getting him aroused might help him remember". Right, and drinking bleach or injecting disinfectant will kill the corona virus, too. (Do we know yet where the moron-in-chief got his horrible medical advice?)
So this man wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead man, and finds that he can't remember his own name, or how he got into this situation. But is regaining his memory really top priority when there's a DEAD GUY in the room? Somehow he CAN remember that this represents a bad situation, and he needs to get out of there - only he doesn't do that, he stands in front of the mirror trying to remember his own name. And he can't remember his name, but he remembers how to sing "Happy Birthday" in hopes of jogging his own memory? Plus, did he forget there's a DEAD GUY a few feet away, why, why, why isn't that little tidbit the most important thing on his mind?
Anyway, he finally acts on that impulse to leave, and is stopped in the hotel lobby by a woman claiming to be his wife, only he can't remember her. Yet clearly he finds her attractive, so he at least WISHES he remembered being married to her. And he gets in the car with her to go "home" to a huge mansion with a butler and a private doctor. (Still no mention of the dead guy, like this isn't even a talking point with him for the next hour of movie, so did he forget about it, or did some screenwriter?). He can't believe his luck, that he's rich and married to a hot woman, without any memory of how his life got him into this position. Eventually (after a ton of ad-libbed lines about requesting his butler buy him luxury items) he catches on to the scam that the audience figured out about 30 minutes ago, and he bolts, with only a hotel claim check and a business card from a video-game company as clues to his identity.
A trip to the video-game company office yields no information, because he never enters the building. I guess the film would be over too soon if he did that, but this seems to be standard operating procedure for a storyline that has no sense of direction. Sure, he encounters a waitress in the diner across the street who recognizes him and claims to be his girlfriend, and a couple of co-workers who confirm that he's really a janitor, not a rich person or a secret agent, but damn, it sure takes him a long time to put the pieces of his own life together and come up with something he's willing to believe.
I'll admit that it probably took me much too long to watch this. I think I put it in my Netflix queue two or three years ago, and I never found a way to connect to it, so of course it scrolled off that service. I think it came back on Netflix last year, but then it disappeared again before I could get to it - maybe it moved to Hulu and I missed it there, too. OK, so I've finally cleared it off my list by watching it on iTunes, which cost me $2.99, but it's really my own fault for ignoring it so long. Too bad there was so little payoff here for all my efforts in trying to figure out where to watch it.
It's horribly dated, too, like every main female character is portrayed in a sexual fashion. Yes, I understand that in most cases they're trying to either seduce or befriend this man who might have something that they want, but it just feels like somebody's twisted fantasy where women only exist to bring pleasure to men, and that just doesn't fly in films any more. A lot has changed, or should have changed, since 2007. But I guess this is to be expected from a film co-produced by Brett Ratner, who got forced out of the business in the #metoo movement.
Like near the end, when the female agent fights hand-to-hand with the female villain, the male lead mentally pictures them together in a bubble bath wearing lingerie. Umm, that's not how federal agents, catfights or lesbians work, dude. Anyway, if he found two women fist-fighting to be sexy, then why aren't they fighting in his fantasy? There's a bad disconnect there. Jake gets chastised by Gina for not helping her fight Diane, but NITPICK POINT, what about the other agents that are standing around in that scene, why can't THEY help her? Can they not get involved in her personal fight? Why can't one of them pull a gun and stop the villain character, easy-peasy? It makes no sense.
The attempts to inject him with sodium pentathol (the movie-based "truth serum") don't make sense either, like even if that chemical could make him tell the truth about something (which, umm, it doesn't) how can he even do that if he DOESN'T REMEMBER the truth in the first place? It's not a "jog your memory" drug - that would be ginkgo biloba, right?
Another NITPICK POINT, Jake remembers the location of something, and it's in the set that was used for reference when filming a certain video-game. If the video-game has been released, why the hell is that set still up? It would have been dismantled months ago, once the reference footage had been captured. They probably don't have so many sound stages at the video-game company that they could maintain that set indefinitely.
Yeah, it's a comedy but I still take certain plot elements seriously. I would hope that a screenwriter would do a bit more research into how federal agents, computer chips and video-games work, but I suppose I'm hoping in vain.
Also starring Cedric the Entertainer (last seen in "Top Five"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Set It Up"), Nicollette Sheridan (last seen in "Spy Hard"), Callum Keith Rennie (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), DeRay Davis (last seen in "21 Jump Street"), Will Patton (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Kevin McNulty (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Niecy Nash (last seen in "The Proposal"), Beau Davis, Bart Anderson (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Tom Butler, Robert Clarke (last seen in "Spotlight"), David Lewis (last seen in "The Big Year"), Gina Holden.
RATING: 4 out of 10 office holiday party photos
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