The film starts with an overly elaborate bank robbery as a bunch of hooded men grab a bank truck with a big magnet and lift it over a fence where they cut the doors off to get at the loot. They disregard the cash for some metal plates, which I correctly guessed where engravings for bill printing. Go me. It’s not clear why the mint are driving the valuable plates around some back streets but there you go.
A robber takes the plates on a long journey as the titles run and ends up with Columbo. The robber says he needs the agreed $1.5 million paid by tomorrow. Columbo says that this may present a problem as his son is soon to be married and he has to meet the in-laws - that’s the name of the film!
Alan Arkin plays the other half of this odd couple as a buttoned down dentist who yells too much. The two families meet and Columbo tells tall tales before hiding one of the plates in Arkin’s basement.
He then shows up at Arkin’s dental office and ropes him into a scheme where the remaining plates are removed from his safe under the noses of some heavies. I wasn’t clear why he split the plates up or why he left them somewhere where he couldn’t get at them but you have to go with it. Arkin manages to recover the plates but doesn’t appreciate being shot at, and his wife is unhappy too as she found the other one and called in the cops.
At this point I wasn’t clear if Columbo was a crook or a CIA operative as he claimed. He gets disavowed by his handler Ed Begley Jnr, but that may be a bluff too. Anyway, before the wedding the two guys have innumerable and intolerable adventures where they fly to Honduras in a racist airline ‘Wong Airways’ before trying to offload the goods to a tiresome dictator. Will they survive? What is the plot? And will they make the wedding on time?
You’ll probably have gathered that I didn’t enjoy this one too much and to be honest the only smirk the film earned from me was the dictator’s new flag for his country that has a big pair of knockers on it. I know lowbrow humour wins the day, but I didn’t enjoy the farce or wackiness that permeated throughout the film.
I normally like Alan Arkin, but as a shouty and neurotic dentist he was no fun and Columbo was no better as the man of mystery I couldn’t get interested in. At times the comedy was so on the nose I could barely watch, with the dictator’s hand puppet and silly voice just plain embarrassing.
The plot was sketchy at best and really just served to put our heroes into funny situations. The idea that the plates will be used to destabilise the economy was fair enough but why not just take out the baddies with some carpet bombing, rather than have an overlong and unfunny caper to achieve the same result? Oh, so you can have a film?, I see.
The set pieces were poor with an overlong car chase that inevitably resulted in the demise of some fruit, and another sequence where they kept circling with the baddies in their cars -’Again?’ says Arkin at the fifth repetition - I’m afraid so Alan.
The high praise lavished on this film tells you that it must appeal to someone, but it wasn’t me. The capers were too contrived and the characters lacked anything that made me give a toss.
THE Tag Line : As Fun as a Visit to Your In-Laws - 50%
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