TITLE : IT's not worth Jack

Fifteen years ago I totally believed the touching hype this dreck of a movie that emanated from its trailer. Therefore , upon my very bad choice , some colleagues of mine and I saw this movie between two out of town rehearsals as a hopefully pleasant way to pass the time.

Boy was I wrong. Boy did I get yelled at.

( DUDE !! I am going to want that 90 minutes of my life back when I am dead... why did you make us go watch that ****??? )

And I am afraid I couldn't have agreed with them more.

Now as I refamiliarize myself with this horrible film, I wondered why I even ever THOUGHT it would work. This movie is some sort of terribly failed attempt to mix Love Story, Pagliacci, Terms of Endearment , Days of Wine and Roses, and Three Days of the Condor and ( plus a handful of other political thrillers) and make some sort of highbrow version of a Lifetime-TV movie. What in the world was I expecting, an action-weeper? A heartwarming thriller?

As you have probably figured out from my outrage so far, the overview of what the heck goes on in this movie is going to SOUND like I am on too much cold medicine but here goes ::

( Please note I am not mentioning the casting at all until the next paragraph because that's a whole other world of silliness in and of itself. )

John is a mess. He's an alcoholic who sleeps too much and doesn't do a very good job raising his two little boys, Jack and Dylan. His wife has died before the movie starts. When John's not drunk or asleep he makes his living as some sort of male Elvira on a local horror movie series where he goes by the name of AL GORY. ( Oh!! What wit in this ****, oops I mean script. ) Jack is in love with a pretty girl at school, it doesn't go anywhere. John decides that the creepy guy next door, is a NAZI. ( You can't make this up folks, although horrifyingly SOMEONE did. ) So in a drunken on -screen tirade , John goes off condemning Nazis and all but directly fingers his neighbor as one of them. So ------ wait, on second thought I will not COMPLETELY spoil every single thing that happens in this dreck of a movie should for some silly reason ( to laugh at it? to see if it's as bad as I am saying?) pay to rent it -- -therefore I will talk AROUND what happens next. Said Nazi does something bad to someone in John's family. After said bad thing happens, the poor victimized person has a condition. At the end when John stops being such a drunk and lousy father, the person's condition goes away and everyone lives happily ever after over the angelic watch of dead wife/mom.

Before I get to the casting, if no one remembers this movie, there's a reason. But if you do, you might draw a parallel to the shattering failure of the Sean Penn-starring new version of " All the King's Men " from a couple movie seasons ago. Everyone said it was Oscar-Worthy , that the script was dynamite, etc etc. Instead it was a seething mess of failed ideas. Before Jack The Bear came out, it was supposed to the lead actor's chance at an Oscar. It was supposed to be another Terms of Endearment. It was finally perhaps going to make the lady who plays the dead Mom a star.

Needless to say , since I still bet most you don't rememeber nor have even HEARD of this movie, none of those things happened.

But now looking at the casting, it's so funny that anyone could have THOUGHT this would work -- it's ALMOST worth sitting through again just to giggle.

The drunken, sad dad? It's Danny DeVito. Yes, Danny DeVito. I love him and he does such a good job in so many things, but here he looks like Billy Barty trying to play Grandpa Walton or Mr. Chips. Even Mr. DD himself seems to grasp that he is so miscast that he looks like he is indeed in pain when he acts the intended-to-be heavy-duty emotional stuff towards the end of the movie. And then we have a way-pre-Oscar Reese Witherspoon as one of the son's googly-eyed wanna-be love interests-- and she looks like she wandered in from an after-school special. The evil Nazi person from the neighborhood is Gary Sinise. Yes, Gary Sinise. This fine actor does the best job he can in this no-win circumstance but he is SO creepy and terrifying in this hokum of circumstance he totally seems like a cement mixer used to kill a fly-- it's if we needed a slightly scary muppet to full out a Sesame Street sequence and instead we got Vincent Price in his House Of Wax years.

Julia-Louis Dreyfuss is wasted completely in a way-pre Seinfeld throwaway role-- and in the final bit of casting--this next example in my opinion is the saddest-- because this movie's hype alleged that this lady would finally be a bona fide STAR with this role-- instead of being just another member of this embarrassed set of actors.

Andrea Marcovicci. She has had a wonderful career in her own right but has never completely achieved the major recognition that I feel she so richly deserves. For those of us of a certain age, some of us first came to know her ( and it's when yours truly first fell madly in love with her-- and I have never fallen out yet. ) in the early 1970's in her stereotype-breaking soap-opera character Dr. Betsy Chernak on " Love is a Many Splendored Thing". She was a doctor, she wasn't the weak, lil- livered kind of last 60s-early 70s soap character, she was a forthright, brazen, intelligent independent force to be reckoned with. ( She even insisted to her boyfriend that they live together because she didn't WANT to get married.) And with her long hippie hair, and her statue-like cheekbones and her skin to die for-- she melted people. Again , I haven't unmelted yet. She has had a major career as a cabaret singer and has had dozens and dozens of roles in B movies and on episodic television but she had never risen above the casual viewer's level of " Now where I have I seen that lady before?"

And yes,. ladies and gentlemen SHE plays the deceased mom who comes back often bathed in memories of angelic golden light to provide wisdom, solace and some attempt at distraction from the atrocious plot at hand. Even her luminosity, both faked from the oogy filming and naturally from what a stunning human being she is can't light up the dark stupidity and egregious silliness that pervades this disaster of a movie.

And finally for your last bit of near-spoiling.. SHE is the person who holds the key to what exactly 'Jack The Bear" means in terms of how it works into the plot. And this sweet revelation is supposed to make you go AWWWWWWW.. , instead by this point it just makes you say " AWWW, get me the he$$ out of here... or AWWWW give me your $9 empty popcorn bucket so I can throw up in it."

I have seen a lot of bad movies in my time, but this may be the WORST and most MISUSED set of talented people I have ever seen, and oddly NONE of these famed actors in this film ever seem to mention this movie when they are talking about their past work... ( Especially not mighty Thirtysomething/My So-Called Life/Once and Again creator Marshall Herskovitz.)

Gee, I wonder Why?

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age