Ruthless People

Produced by Michael Peyser

At the Nickelodeon

Every movie has its season. This one is a summer movie. It will make you laugh only if you've spent the day on the beach letting the sun dissolve your brain.

It's a story about people who try to be ruthless, but turn out to have soft spots and warm hearts after all. There are rich people who are bad, poor people who are exploited--i.e. good--dumb cops, dumb blondes, dumb dogs and a lot of other classic on-screen stereotypes which for some reason make audiences laugh as if they haven't seen this movie every summer since they sneaked into their first R-rated movie at age 13.

The premise of Ruthless People should be enough warning. Sam Stone, the short fat "Spandex miniskirt king" (Danny DeVito) plots with his nymphomaniac red-headed mistress to murder his wife. But when Stone gets home with the chloroform, he discovers his wife has been kidnapped. This makes him happy--all he has to do is ignore the abducter's ultimatum: $500,000 or a dead wife. Right?

Wrong. This is Hollywood comedy. It turns out that the kidnappers are not bloodthirsty villains but an all-American couple named Sandy and Ken (sounds like...Barbie and Ken), who have been exploited by the forces of domination, i.e. the evil fashion industry. Wide-eyed Sandy (Helen Slater), who dreams of being the next Gloria Vanderbilt, apparantly originally designed the Spandex miniskirt which made Sam Stone his fortune, and the oppressed seek revenge.

Convoluting the plot further, Stone's middle-aged mistress and her dumb-stud pal decide to blackmail the fashion mogul. While trying to videotape Stone murdering his wife, they succeed only in filming the local police chief with a prostitute in his car. Here, the movie attempts to develop the characters, depicting the plotting woman and her friend as too sensitive to watch the alleged murder on the videotape.

The reversal of traditional good guy and bad guy roles theme reappears as we get to know the kidnappers better. The happy couple is too scared and too nice to kill Mrs. Stone (Bette Midler), so they keep lowering the ransom price, until Mrs. Stone complains she's been "kidnapped by K-mart." In the end, however, their niceness triumphs; Sandy's sincerity and her ballgown designs win the heart of the bitchy Mrs. Stone, and they all band together against the real villain, Mr. Stone.

DeVito, at a round, balding five feet seems typecast as the quasi-crude, allegedly ruthless exploiter, as he skips around his multi-colored Memphisdecor with a bottle of champagne to celebrate his wife's fate, tries to shoot her poodle Muffy, and leers lustfully at his mistress.

Curly-haired Judge Reinhold's cute face mixes fear, determination and desperation well as Ken the kidnapper, but Helen Slater as his wife is just too sweet. Bette Midler as Mrs. Stone adds a refreshing, and necessary bit of life to the otherwise completely cariacatured movie, with her exaggerated but occasionally hilarious performance as a spoiled rich bitch who, underneath her dyed hair and her gold lame jumpsuit, just wants to be loved.

Midler insults her kidnappers and bounces up and down in time with TV exercise programs with real spunk, although even that deteriorates by the end of the movie, when she kicks her husband into the water in a bad imitation of Abbott and Costello.

The plot unfolds predictably enough, with just enough twists to prevent you from leaving in the middle. But, since its characters are so dimensionless, new ones have to be introduced at each step of the plot's development: the police chief who has sex with a whore in his car; the bumbling blonde idiot who is Stone's mistress' lover and lives in a mobile home with a lava lamp; and the most ridiculous of all, a crazed bedroom killer who appears on the scene at the last minute and saves everybody.

Some of the movie's funniest moments have nothing to do with the central characters or the carefully balanced twistings of the plot. In a ridiculously gratuitous, but actually funny scene, Ken is faced with a sad picture of social reality while selling stereos. A streetpunk enters the store, ready to be conned into spending all his allowance on speakers. Ken easily convinces him that bigger is better, and introduces him to the eight-foot Dominator speaker. The kid practically drools, violently playing air-guitar, ready to fork over his grandmother, when in walks his girlfriend, 17, barefoot and pregnant. Stricken with remorse, Ken turns down the heavy metal that throbs from the Dominator, and shows the underpriveleged couple a smaller model.

Ruthless People combines all the old gags in the book, wrapped up in a slightly different package--from car chases to clown masks to sex with a Dustbuster. It's so over-conscious of trying to be the screwiest comedy ever, of trying to be crude and daring, that it ends up too slick, too planned and much too repetitious. Another summer, another summer movie.