Driving Me Crazy Reviews

Goofy, wiry-haired German comic Thomas Gottschalk stars in DRIVING ME CRAZY, a dull but inoffensive farce overflowing with star cameos, including Milton Berle, Morton Downey, Jr. and L.A. Lakers star Vlade Divac. Gunther (Gottschalk) is an eccentric East German inventor who has overhauled a rattletrap communist-made subcompact, the notorious Trabbi, to run over 200 mph on vegetable fuel without creating pollution. The fall of the Berlin Wall has left him and his fellow villagers in a bind. They need to come up with $15 million to buy their land back from the government before it is sold to greedy American developer John McReady (George Kennedy). McReady charms the villagers with promises of shopping malls and fast food, but he really intends to erect a smoke-belching industrial complex on the site. Gunther decides to bring his miracle car over to the US, to showcase it at a Los Angeles car show in hopes of selling it to a car company and raising the money to save his village. Gunther teams up with a parking lot attendant at his hotel, savvy ex-car-thief Max (Billy Dee Williams), to help him sell the car. But when the villainous Mr. B (Dom DeLuise) catches wind of Gunther's invention, he dispatches goofy goon Vince (James Tolkan) to steal the car. Low-key wackiness ensues as Max and Gunther do some mild male-bonding while pursuing the purloined Trabbi. On the side, Gunther also does some low-key male-female bonding with an ex-chubby girl who left his village and metamorphosed into svelte LA knockout Ricki (Michelle Johnson). Scenes featuring Johnson (the teen vixen from BLAME IT ON RIO, who still looks like a frisky, voluptuous schoolgirl) in modest though skintight exercise outfits are about as rousing as DRIVING ME CRAZY ever gets. And it doesn't say much for the film's mirth quotient that Divac gets the film's single biggest laugh in a throwaway one-word scene as the Yugo representative at the car show. However, if DRIVING is never a laugh riot, neither does it ever get strained, belabored or distasteful. Gottschalk is likable if uninspired as the Pierre Richard/Gene Wilder-ish hero. And the rest of the cast follows suit. Williams and DeLuise both seem to have phoned in their performances. However, considering that both usually show a real fondness for devouring scenery, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Director Jon Turteltaub keeps the action moving at a brisk, breezy pace without pretending that the script, co-written by Turteltaub with Johnny London and second-unit director David Tausik, is any funnier than it really is. Many of the bigger gags, in particular, seem pitched to Gottschalk's pinched home audience. One in which he runs rampant in an L.A. supermarket will particularly be lost on American audiences who go to supermarkets every day. But anyone going in without too-high expectations may find DRIVING ME CRAZY a pleasant family entertainment in the tradition of vintage Disney comedies like THE LOVE BUG, even though there is little danger that it will ever be mistaken even for Tati's uproarious TRAFFIC.