Bird on a Wire Reviews

Big, dull, and noisy, this comedy-romance has chases galore, but its comedy is flat and its romance is grating and graceless. It also has one of those inane but complicated big-budget plots that huffs, puffs, grunts, and bends over backwards to make sure that its stars do the same. Goldie Hawn starts as big-time wheeler-dealer Marianne Graves, who's looking forward to a dull week of business meetings in Detroit as the film lurches to putative life. Stopping at a gas station, she recognizes the attendant as her former boy friend, Rick Jarmin. We, of course, recognize him as Mel Gibson. But for some reason Jarmin refuses to recognize Graves, insisting that he's a simpleminded redneck mechanic named Billy Ray instead of the dashing left-wing radical who ditched Graves at the altar 15 years previously. She stakes out the station to see if she's right about his identity. Meanwhile, big-time drug dealer Sorenson (David Carradine), who was put away by Jarmin's testimony, is being released from prison. When Sorenson joins his still-at-large partner Diggs (Bill Duke), vengeance is the name of their game. It seems that after testifying against Sorenson and Diggs, Jarmin became part of the Federal Witness Relocation Program, which explains why he refuses to recognize Graves. Nevertheless, Graves has blown Jarmin's cover, and he makes a frantic call to his relocation contact for a new identity. He finds, however, that his old contact has been retired. What's more, his new contact, Joe Weyburn (Stephen Tobolowsky), is in league with Diggs and Sorenson. Just as Graves prepares to confront Jarmin, Sorenson and Diggs show up at the gas station with guns blazing. They kill Jarmin's kindly old boss at the gas station and pin the murder on Jarmin and Graves, who get away, but now have the police as well as drug dealers and rogue FBI agents hot on their trail. While eluding their pursuers, Jarmin and Graves visit old acquaintances of Jarmin's from his various incarnations, primarily tall, sexy Joan Severance as a country veterinarian, and Alex Bruhanski as a hairdresser who used to be Jarmin's boss. Severance sews up the buckshot wound in Jarmin's rear, and Bruhanski returns Jarmin's address book, which contains the home address of Jarmin's former FBI contact. Eventually Jarmin and Graves catch up with the contact, only to find that he's now senile. While most of the police forces of the Western world close in on the fugitive couple, a final confrontation occurs at a zoo after hours. There's more plot, but it doesn't get any better. Along the way are plenty of chases--in cars, on motorcycles, and in airplanes. And through it all, Jarmin and Graves blissfully bicker while trudging through the woods, crawling along skyscraper ledges, and staying in cheap motels infested with giant roaches. It's all meant to be zany, wacky and endearing; instead, it's uniformly dull, derivative, and tedious. Though the script by David Seltzer, Louis Venosta, and Eric Lerner is overstuffed with exposition--including the dreaded flashback--the characters remain shrill and annoying. It's impossible to care about the romance between Jarmin and Graves, because it's impossible to care about them as people. The humor in BIRD ON A WIRE is even less compelling than the film's illogical plot and cardboard characters, consisting mostly of underwear jokes, feeble sex gags about Jarmin's "Mister Wiggly," and stereotypical swishery when Jarmin confronts his hairdresser ex-employer. All of this uninspired slop is wrapped up in a glossy but crude package by John Badham (STAKEOUT), who never seems to have decided just what type of film he was directing. Brutal gunplay gives way to bathroom jokes, which give way to steamy romance, all without the slightest rhyme or reason. From its brainless big-name casting to its sloppy script and its overblown, by-the-numbers direction, BIRD ON A WIRE serves best as a one-film course in everything that's mind-numbingly mediocre in contemporary mainstream American cinema. (Adult situations, violence, profanity.)