That would be a Des Moines video-store clerk who drops in unannounced on his London-dwelling brother on his own birthday. The brother, more to get rid of him during an important business dinner than to give him a proper birthday present, signs him up for a participatory role-playing game called the Theatre of Life. By the biggest of coincidences, and before the game has even begun, he intercepts a call in a public phone booth intended for an actual hit man and is rerouted instead into a real espionage plot to scuttle a British-Russian peace accord. He never notices the mistake, even when in the thick of a hairy car chase or in the line of fire of live ammunition ("Time out! Time out! I got something in my eye"). Talking at cross-purposes can occasionally be amusing for a scene or a part of a scene, but here it goes on — and on — for an entire movie. The fact that the hero is only pretending to be acting ("Honestly, I can't act") provides a built-in alibi for any half-heartedness or quarter-heartedness in Bill Murray's performance. The finale, when the star, in a footstool-sized fur hat, gets hustled into the middle of a Russian folk-dancing troupe, is good for a couple of chuckles until you start to imagine how much farther a Chaplin or a Keaton, a Bob Hope or a Jerry Lewis, would have run with the idea. Joanne Whalley, Peter Gallagher, Alfred Molina; directed by Jon Amiel. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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