My World of Flops Pisco-No-Go Case File #155 Wise Guys (1986)
Name a more iconic duo!
Welcome to the very first entry in Danny DeVito Month here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place! Wise Guys is also the first My World of Flops piece in a while because I very much want to continue cranking out my features throughout 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin and Wise Guys is a perfect candidate for my longest running column.
It’s a critically reviled box office bomb from funnyman Brian De Palma starring Joe Piscopo, a flop of a would-be movie star who would only be given one more shot as a lead before being relegated to a world of supporting roles in Chuck Norris movies and the like.
I wanted to kick off Danny DeVito Month with Johnny Dangerously because of all of DeVito’s movies, it’s the only one with a theme song by “Weird Al” Yankovic. I am, truth be told, going through a bit of an extended “Weird Al” Yankovic phase right now. I’m really immersing myself in Al’s ineffable oeuvre, writing about Yankovic as if my professional future and my family’s financial security are dependent upon it!
Alas, Johnny Dangerously is not available on streaming, puzzlingly, so I had to settle for another flop comedy pairing a man America has never stopped loving in DeVito and a failure of a human being who got off to a deceptively impressive head start before the public quickly tired of him and his antics in Piscopo.
Appearing in the flops Johnny Dangerously and Wise Guys destroyed Piscopo’s chances of following cast-mate and buddy Eddie Murphy into the world of movie superstardom. It took just three flops—Johnny Dangerously, Wise Guys and Dead Heat—to kill Piscopo’s career, just at it only took three movies—48 Hours, Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop—to make Murphy arguably the biggest, hottest movie star in the world.
How bullet-proof is DeVito? Not only did co-starring in Johnny Dangerously and Wise Guys not kill DeVito’s career as a movie star and leading man; they barely affected it.
The moviegoing public doesn’t hold DeVito’s flops against him. He is among the least likely of movie stars and if he were to, say, pop up in a Transformers movie I wouldn’t be disappointed; I’d just assume he made a lot of money and had a lot of fun and made whatever shit-show he was gracing with his services inherently better through his rascally presence alone.
If anything, when DeVito pops up in something wildly commercial or slick his appearance feels weirdly, inherently subversive and anarchic. Besides, it’s precisely DeVito’s open-mindedness to doing the kinds of roles and projects others might consider beneath them that led to him signing onto the second year of a basic cable sitcom about misanthropic twenty-somethings despite being objectively way too big a star and a celebrity for such a modest show. DeVito consequently helped make It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia one of the funniest and long-running television comedies in history.
That Wise Guys is an appallingly bad motion picture has nothing to do with DeVito’s characteristic fine work in it. DeVito breathes real pathos, sadness and humor out of thankless role of Harry Valentini, a much put-upon gofer for the Newark mob who dreams of something more, specifically opening an Italian-Jewish restaurant-deli with his neighbor and best friend, Moe Dickstein.
For the role of Moe Dickstein the filmmakers needed someone who could carry a film, seemed roughly the same age as the then-forty-two year old DeVito and could convincingly play Jewish, since Moe’s religion makes up about seventy percent of his character. In Piscopo, De Palma went zero for three.
Wise Guys is the brain child of screenwriter George Gallo, who wrote one of the all-time great action screenplays in Midnight Run and a whole bunch of scripts that made audiences and critics alike sit up and say, “This is from the writer of Midnight Run? Did he have some manner of talent-extraction surgery immediately following its completion?
I’m talking grade a woofers like Trapped in Paradise, Double Take, See Spot Run (a dog about a dog) the abysmal Whole Nine Yards sequel The Whole Ten Yards, Code Name: The Cleaner, My Mom’s New Boyfriend and the bizarre vanity project and potential My World of Flops Case File Middle Men, a comedy about the outrageous real-life adventures of internet investor Christopher Mallick that producer Mallick apparently funded himself via extensive financial fraud.
Gallo’s script for Wise Guys, his first produced screenplay, falls unmistakably into the “This is the dude who wrote Midnight Run?” category. It’s a joyless, mirth-free dark comedy in which the intelligence of both the main characters and the mob they work for and then conspire against change wildly depending on the demands off any given scene.
It’s the kind of movie that begins by establishing that its underdog heroes are bumbling buffoons with the reverse Midas Touch, who screw up everything they come into contact with and probably shouldn’t even be trusted with responsibilities as minor as picking up dry cleaning and ends with its heroes outwitting the mob and death in a brilliant game of 5-Dimensional Chess using genius and cunning they’ve cunningly kept a deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply buried secret throughout the film.
DeVito and Piscopo star as bumbling gofers Harry and Moe, everyday New Jersey schmoes who handle all of the tedious, non-violent drudge work their more capable and less pathetic colleagues can’t be bothered with.
These colleagues include legendary wrestling manager Captain Lou Albano as Freddie the Fixer, a gentleman who looks like an angry couch that has grown sentient and is perpetually a shade of red otherwise seen only in ripe tomatoes and people experiencing heart attacks.
I got legit excited when I saw Albano’s name in the credit alongside heavyweights like Ray Sharkey, Dan Hedaya as main mob boss Anthony Castelo, mob movie fixture Frank Vincent and Patti LuPone. I grew up in the era of Rock and Wrestling, so Albano hits me right in the nostalgia sweet spot but good fucking lord does Albano play a huge role in the film’s colossal failure.
Wise Guys seems to labor under the delusion that unless it provides continual on-screen explanations for Albano being massively overweight then the audience will become so confused by the discrepancy between the wrestling legend’s body type and that of, say, Piscopo’s, that it’ll take them out of the movie.
The filmmakers obviously don’t want anything to get in the way of the audience’s enjoyment of Albano’s comic genius so to explain why he’s overweight the filmmakers have him eat an entire Thanksgiving Turkey or full-on meat loaf or roasted pig with his bare hands in literally half his scenes.
Wise Guys traffics extensively in the comedy of cruelty, or rather the attempted comedy of cruelty. To cite a characteristic gag, Albano calls Dickstein “Dick-Face” over and over and over and over again, only to be meekly corrected by Dickstein, when it’s obvious by Frankie’s hatred of Moe, and Harry, and everyone else in the movie, that he’s calling him “Dick-Face” to be an asshole, not because he genuinely thinks that’s his last name.
Albano’s perversely extended performance is screamingly loud, vulgar and unfunny, one note played endlessly and artlessly for 91 painful minutes. That describes the movie as well: it’s relentlessly mean-spirited but also inexplicably devoid of style and visual elan for a Brian De Palma movie.
Except for this set-up, which is actually pretty cool.
If any film could benefit from the excitement and audacity of De Palma in full-on auteur mad man mode it’s this non-starter of a mob comedy, which follows Harry and Moe as they make one poor decision after another, beginning with Harry choosing to bet the money Hedaya’s casually sadistic mob kingpin gave them to invest at the track not on the horse their boss chose but instead on a horse Harry has a really good feeling about.
The mob understandably does not respond well to Harry’s ill-advised independence, particularly when the horse Harry chose not to bet on ends up winning first place. Castelo wants both men dead for their transgressions but he’s fascinated and impressed by Moe and Harry’s loyalty to each other. So to test their friendship and loyalty the mob boss assigns Moe to kill Harry and Harry to kill Moe.
The mobsters take bets on which man will end up alive but our hapless heroes find out that they’re both marked for death by a mob they screwed over recently so they head to Atlantic City with Frankie the Fixer’s beloved automobile and decide to live the high life while evading the icy grasp of Anthony Castelo and his minions.
It seems a little strange that it’s taken me and this column THIRTEEN years to finally get around to an infamous flop like this but watching Wise Men I half-remembered watching it before, either as a teenager or as a potential case file and thinking it was a quintessential Failure. I love both Secret Successes and Fiascoes, but I fucking hate Failures.
No, wait, that’s not accurate. I don’t care about Failures enough to hate them. They’re not crazy or audacious or egregiously awful enough to merit an emotion as strong as hatred. That’s Wise Guys. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. Mostly it just bored and disappointed me in a way I never imagined a De Palma movie could.
DeVito Month gets off to a whimper rather than a bang with this complete whiff that thankfully leaves us nowhere to go but up, assuming, of course, that I do not IMMEDIATELY follow this up with Johnny Dangerously, which could very well be just as bad.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course we sure would dig it if you would #BuyMyBook over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1582919691&sr=8-1