Terry Gilliam makes big messes. Time Bandits. Brazil. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Each one more unmanageably ambitious than the debacle before it. The Fisher King, next in line, looks like a hard one to top. You always come out of any Gilliam movie feeling vaguely a need to be hosed off, as if you had spent the afternoon in a boiler room or an abattoir. But this one, about the alliance between a former History professor (now a Looney Tunes street person) and a former deejay (now a sot), succeeds in being every bit as repulsive in its pretensions as in its mere appearances. Gilliam's camerawork, as before, but this time more than before, is busy without purpose. He changes moods as capriciously and jarringly as by TV remote-control. (Lyrical mood: Grand Central Station at rush hour is transformed into a Roseland-type ballroom. Antic mood: a mustachioed drag queen with a bouquet of balloons delivers a singing telegram to a tune from Gypsy atop an office desk. Tragic mood: a Manhattan yuppie is hit in the mouth by a glob of his wife's brains when she is blasted from behind by a shotgun.) And he brandishes myth -- mythology -- mythicality -- with the innocent faith of a George Lucas. (Specifically and explicitly the Holy Grail myth, just as in the last Indiana Jones adventure, but general quest and redemption myths too.) With Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl, and Amanda Plummer. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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