Corky Romano Reviews

Though a decent showcase for Saturday Night Live star Chris Kattan's talents as a physical comic, this broad, coarse farce is otherwise as insubstantial a piece of work as you could possibly imagine; in fact, a light breeze could blow it away. But it could be worse; imagine, if you will, an entire film based on one of Kattan's recurring SNL characters, like the simian Mr. Peppers. The titular Corky (Kattan) is a cheerful, naive veterinarian with a heart of gold and, as the trailers have it, a song in his heart. And when we first meet him, that song is A-ha's '80s hit "Take on Me." Soon after, we learn he's also the black sheep of a mob family run by long-lost dad Pops Romano (Peter Falk, who, perhaps contractually, gets to play most of the movie in bed) and Corky's oafish brothers, Peter (Chris Penn) and Paulie (Peter Berg). It seems the FBI has the goods on Pop, thanks to family informant Leo Corrigan (Fred Ward), and he's going down unless Corky can infiltrate the FBI and steal the incriminating evidence file. Unfortunately, the hacker strong-armed into creating Corky's bogus FBI identity gives him the résumé of a super agent named Pissant — "It's French," Corky explains in one of the film's lamer running gags — and the rest of the story is a series of comic misadventures in which Corky must live up to the agency's impossible expectations, save his family and, of course, romance beautiful female agent Kate Russo (Vinessa Shaw), with whom he initially competes. Kattan acquits himself fairly well here, in a sub-Jim Carrey/Jerry Lewis sort of way (translation: shameless mugging abounds) and old pros Falk and Richard Roundtree (the original Shaft, here playing Corky's FBI boss) are on hand to keep things grounded whenever the often lazily-written script threatens to abandon any pretence of believability. Speaking of which, Matthew Glave (Adam Sandler's romantic competition in THE WEDDING SINGER) nearly steals the show as straight-arrow FBI man Brick Davis, who's afflicted by barely suppressed insecurities that, as it turns out, can only be explained by seriously sub-par writing.