MIXED NUTS (1994) * Wildly consistent film: it very quickly establishes that there's very little hope for itself, and then doggedly delivers on its promise. I've never seen a premise that Steve Martin couldn't figure out what to do with, but here he is as an emergency help line operator on Christmas Eve, more lost than any of the gems on the other end of the line. You can get a sense of how bad the film is by realizing that it's towards the very lowest rung associated with Adam Sandler, but in fairness he's not much of the problem. He has one of the better scenes, anyway. So I'm saying that it's like a really bad Adam Sandler movie, rather than that it is one or that he even has much to do with it. And Madeline Kahn! How can you possibly have Madeline Kahn and Steve Martin trying to be funny in so many scenes and still have it come out so lame? Nora Ephron doesn't deserve all the credit, like when Casey Stengel said he couldn'ta done it without the players ('62 Mets reference, anything but this film). Every single one of the principles have done majorly better work, repeatedly, and no one does anything particularly like shine, but Juliette Lewis comes out of it the least worst. It's a Christmas movie to reassure lonely desperados, I guess. Well, I can kind of see how the French novel might have worked.
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