Writer and director Andrew Bergman (So Fine, The Freshman) will go a long way for a gag -- and a planeload of skydiving Elvis impersonators en route to a convention of their brethren in Las Vegas may fairly be described as "far-out." But Bergman can be oddly plodding about getting to such a destination. The pre-credits deathbed promise is, or soon will be, redundant (if a man is a divorce detective, he does not need a mother complex to turn him off marriage); and the expository voice-over narration is ungainly ("The man in the limo was Tommy Korman the gambler, and he was about to enter my life"); and it wasn't strictly necessary -- even in light of the offbeat casting of nobody's idea of a classic beauty, Sarah Jessica Parker -- to make the hero's fiancée be the spitting image of a sentimental gangster's late wife (odd that his adult son doesn't remark on the fact). Still, we are fortunate to travel the route, no matter how slow-going, in the company of Nicolas Cage, who draws his humor from some unusual sources, the very things that make him almost insufferable in dramatic parts: pleading sincerity, painful sensitivity, a hair-trigger shockability, a naked dismay that splits open his face like a coconut. In short, he's content to be laughed at, not with. James Caan, Pat Morita, Peter Boyle. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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