gavin6942
A man picked randomly out of a crowd is made the target of CIA surveillance and pursuit.As Tom Hanks himself acknowledges, the movie is not that good. The plot is okay, but a bit convoluted. The comedy is more often of the absurd kind, and I am not sure it always succeeds. Jim Belushi is rather the strong point of the comedy parts. Also, as 1980s movies end to do, a romance is thrown in for some reason... it seems somewhat forced.What makes this movie worth watching, despite the "blah" of the overall plot and comedy, is the ensemble cast. Tom Hanks may be the star, but he probably doesn't have 50% of the screen time, because he is sharing it with Dabney Coleman, Jim Belushi, Carrie Fisher (in a small role), Charles Durning, Ed Hermann, Lori Singer, Gerrit Graham and more I'm not recalling at the moment. It is a truly impressive cast.
ElMaruecan82
"The Tall Blonde With One Black Shoe" was a delightful spy-farce written by the French Billy Wilder: Francis Veber. It was a tale of mistaken identity, featuring a poor schmuck who had the misfortune to look weird enough at the airport to be selected by secret agents as a foil for a rival organization, in order to create a distraction while a real agent was operating. Most of the gags resulted from the hero's ignorance of what was happening, being the straight man of a rodeo of gags he unknowingly caused.It's certainly a credit to Veber's talent (more than probable connections with Hollywood) that most, if not all, of his films were remade by American directors; they exuded a particular flavor that could be easily cooked up with American ingredients. Still, the problem with the remakes is that they were all remakes, which means that they didn't try to change the original plot, let alone to improve it. In the best case, they had the merit to awaken the curiosity of some foreign movie buffs who probably thought it would be a better idea to check the original film instead. "The Man With One Red Shoe" is one of these 'for-the-sake-of-it" remakes.The director, Stan Dragoti, is in such a hurry to get to the infamous airport scene that the whole set-up in Morocco is irrelevant; it could have gotten to the point as well without trying too hard to give an explanation, and the assumption a 'serious' set-up for a promising screwball gag is immediately deceived when Tom Hanks makes his entrance, as Richard Drew. The film then challenges your patience while the first gags (because we don't expect subtle verbal humor, there had to be gags) take their time.I like Tom Hanks in his clumsy curly-haired earlier roles, but it's a shame how his talent is underexploited for the role, it's another shame that with such a great comedic casting (Dabney Coleman, Carrie Fisher, Charles Durning and Jim Belushi), the comedy fails lamentably. Even Lori Singer was good for the role but there was no way left to us to believe there was chemistry between her and the unfortunate hero. She was just the beautiful blonde agent, Richard a gentle bachelor and ta-ta, it had to work. Dragoti takes the original script for granted and never tries to outsmart it a little bit.Not that the gags were totally absent though, Jim Belushi saves the day as the cuckolded best friend, but even in the supposed-to-be-funny scenes where he tries to show Hanks that something weird is going on, there's a problem of timing, of direction, that makes all the gags fall flat, like a false note. The film even fails to reprise the most iconic moment with Singer's bottomless robe when her hair is stuck in the zipper, in the French film, it took time to get to it, here it's so fast we don't have time to savor the growing romance. If reprising a good film was enough to make another good film, many directors would use the same trick.Reading Roger Ebert's review, I noticed he said "the first film wasn't even funny in the first place", not true, it was funny in a patient and subtle way, it was funny because it was French agents acting seriously like in James Bond movies, which was already a gag by itself. "The Man With One Red Shoe" could have done better if it didn't try to imitate French imitating Americans, simply make the agents more ruthless, a darker humor, more blood, more chaos around Hanks. But it's like they didn't even trust their own capabilities, at the end, the film, ironically, gets even less violent than the remake, which is saying a lot. Didn't I say the director didn't challenge his own material?And how about the ultimate confrontation between the leaders, the whole punch line is missing. For all we know, Durning turns into the mastermind to another employee and that's that, nothing else, Coleman and Durning together, that would have been something. Anyway, the film doesn't bring much newness to the screen to a point that it didn't even attract the Razzie's attention, it's just one film without pretension, a plot recycled to please the American audience, but without trying too hard. Why not inserting KGB agents? Why not having Singer playing a Russian spy? How about some outdoor gags, given the budget they had for the opening scene, they could have afforded it.But no, they played it to the cards, and 30 years later, as it shows, the film is totally forgotten, not worthy enough to be called a cult-classic. I liked it when I first saw it but then I was only 11 and didn't even see the remake. Ironically, I saw more Veber's remakes before the originals but each time, they didn't hold a candle. "The Man With One Red Shoe" doesn't trust its own potential and can't exceed the limits of the original script, which doesn't work for an American setting.At least, "Dinner for Schmucks" tried very hard to Americanize the French version and to give it a taste of zaniness; at least, Steve Carrel reinvented a whole new character, different than the original. The remake wasn't better for all that, but at least it tried.
