In the directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Five Corners), there are several eye-widening romantic visions: a Manhattan city block lit up like a literal Christmas tree; the spreading sunrise on a California beach; a yacht bedecked with Chinese lanterns under a crescent moon. That sort of thing might have been nice in itself, but in combination with everything else it's simply a small part of Too Much. Shanley, to be sure, is well able to write dialogue that reveals character, and that wastes no time about it, but that also does not know when to quit and leaves nothing unrevealed. His story, to do with a hypochondriac diagnosed as having a fatal "brain cloud" and hired as a human sacrifice to an angry South Seas volcano, is an indigestible blend of the ridiculous, the preposterous, the exaggerated, and the inexplicable. In short, the unswallowable-in-the-first-place. You would have to want, and want very badly, to believe it. But it ought to be up to the movie itself to enable you to want that. Tom Hanks is Joe, which immediately extinguishes the desire in a lot of us. Meg Ryan plays three different roles for no apparent reason other than to induce her to sign the contract. (That all women might look alike to our hero, that any one of them would do as well as another, does not seem a suitably romantic concept.) As in too many movies to be counted, Georges Delerue every now and then comes out with a bit of musical accompaniment which stirs the heart nearly as much as it would stir the heart if it accompanied nothing. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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