Directed by one-half of the co-directing team of The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, but not half as good a movie. The other half of that team, Campbell Scott, has an expanded role on screen as the monocled and facially scarred Teutonic martinet who runs a tight ship on a transatlantic ocean liner. The movie starts off on a pretty good foot, in fact forges ahead on several pretty good feet in succession. Interspersed through the opening credits is what amounts to a silent-comedy slapstick short, about the mounting tit-for-tat hostilities between neighbors at a sidewalk café. It could almost stand on its own, except that the ensuing scene extends and deepens the joke. The two apparent antagonists (Tucci, once again wearing more than one hat, and Oliver Platt) turn out to be starving actors in the Great Depression who fancy themselves as the purest of servants of their art, though a scam to wangle free pastries out of a well-acted Jewish baker shows them to be not just undisciplined but untalented. Overactors, in a word. Wangling free theater tickets instead of pastries, they cross paths and then swords with an egomaniacal Hamlet (Alfred Molina), take refuge from him in a trunk on a wharf, and wake up as stowaways on a Ship of Loons whose passenger list includes the ever-vengeful Hamlet. It includes, in addition to him and the already mentioned martinet, so many hams and hysterics as to make our two stowaways look almost normal. You half expect them -- you fully hope for them -- at some point, and the sooner the better, to wake up on the wharf and discover that the whole thing has been a dream. It never happens. Once the movie takes a bad turn, it stays bad. There are savory bits from Steve Buscemi, Hope Davis, Tony Shalhoub, Allison Janney, Billy Connelly, Lili Taylor, and perhaps others. But the aggregate effect is thunderously unfunny and repellently desperate to please. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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